Anton Darius |
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This month we talked about the principle, first credited to Aristotle, that nature abhors a vacuum. But rather than looking at the axiom through the lens of physics, we turn it sideways and use it to view our spiritual lives.
Here's how it starts:
The older I get, the more I recognize the universality of the axiom, nature abhors a vacuum.
Want to know where to find my children? Go to whichever room is the tidiest. Once they've wrecked it, they move on to the next. They never play in their bedrooms unless the area is clean. Once it is sufficiently cluttered, they'll search for a neater space.
But this isn't just true of children and play areas:
-The newly retired quickly find their calendars fuller than when they had a job.
-In weather systems, high pressure always flows to low pressure.
-Adding more lanes to the freeway should alleviate traffic, right? Well, maybe not. Research shows that increasing throughput might actually promote congestion.
It seems in many areas of life vacuums--which we'll loosely define as empty spaces or the lack of something--are unnatural and unstable. They don't last.
We give the Greek philosopher Aristotle credit for first coming up with this principle even though he never stated the axiom as nature abhors a vacuum. The current phrasing seems to have originated with the French writer François Rabelais in the sixteenth century.
Where am I going with this?
While we're not as concerned with physics in this space, nevertheless I think the principle applies to our spiritual lives too.
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See you next month!
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