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The Do of Potential Energy

James 4:17 New Century Version (NCV)

Anyone who knows the right thing to do, but does not do it, is sinning.


Romans 7:15-18

For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. 

The tension between my wife and I is coming to a breaking point. And that breaking point is either going to turn out for better or worse. The formula for distance is as follows: Matt (mistake) = Jess (distrust). And so it has gone for these 10 years. Notice that the formula does not include mitigation; in other words; Matt (good things) = Jess (approbation/trust) seems to be of negligible effect compared to the mistake coefficient. Thinking in terms of Gibbs free energy, the state of our relationship seems to be much more governed by mistakes (enthalpy) than be any good (entropy). 


Of course this is sad (to have mistakes from 5 years ago thrown in my face with no mention of any positives that have occurred), but it is reality. And though I joke, it is a very serious concern.

Last night as I lay brooding over the way my wife seems to only want to tear me down, I wondered at what my mistakes add up to. Best I could surmise was that sum of them equated to discontentment, a lack of fulfillment. Immediately, in my heart I blamed my wife because am I not supposed to get fulfillment through our relationship? Would I not make as many mistakes, or do otherwhere seeking if I was getting fulfillment in our relationship? This was the thought that took me to sleep.

The thought evolved to the next step upon waking, to an examination of codependence and interdependence. To pin my fulfillment on my wife as such, Matt (fulfillment) = Jess (fulfilling) is clearly a reiteration of the mistake equation. It far outweighs fulfillment from other possibilities. And the most outstanding other possibility not considered in the equation is God. 

Ultimately, it is my relationship with God that has strained all of the other equations all of these years. I'm going to have to put in work. The enthalpy component of the Gibbs free energy equation implies such work. As the temperature and pressure increase, so increases the amount of available free energy to move the reaction forward. 

And here's where choice comes into the equation. We can very well know what needs to happen to move things forward, but if the what needs to happen cannot occur in a day, then we have to string together a series of steps that build the potential energy needed to push the reaction to occurrence. 

And so I find anew a need for a rule of life. And I find verification of a postulate that I have been unearthing for years. Matt (big life) = sum of daily choices. In this equation we meet the connection of the rule of life and atomic habit. And a very simple heuristic becomes in order:

do what you know to do.


https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2019/07/16/doing-is-knowing/

https://www.my5palms.com/addiction-blog/how-do-codependency-and-interdependency-differ/#:~:text=The%20key%20difference%20between%20codependency,person%20that%20you%20lose%20yourself.

https://www.amazon.com/Know-What-Why-Dont-Self-Discipline/dp/B00OH7AB2O

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/subscription-complete/?ck_subscriber_id=2216168253

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