Kinesics: The Art of Perseverance

Once upon a time there was a little frog that lived on a dairy farm with her two older brothers and their mother and father. She was the youngest child and everybody looked after her. One day the little frog and her two brothers decided to go play in the marshy hills just beyond the weeping willow which was their home. They leapfrogged happily along, and because they forgot to look where they were going, they frolicked right into a huge vat of buttermilk…one after the other.

The two older brothers never learned how to swim. They always rode “froggy-back” on their parents’ shoulders whenever they crossed the lily pond. Consequently, they panicked when they fell into the buttermilk and they drowned. The little frog didn’t know how to swim either but discovered that if she kicked like crazy each time she sank, she floated back up to the surface. “I’ll never stop kicking!” she shouted out loud and kicked even faster, with all her might because her very life depended on it. As the sun went down and the moon rose high in the sky, the little frog vowed to kick all night long, if need be, because she was determined to live!

At the crack of dawn, the little frog heard the shrill song of a cardinal that was perched on a distant branch. As the sunlight pierced its way through the branches, she realized that she had spent the entire night kicking in the buttermilk vat. Grateful for the strength of her powerful little frog legs, she hopped herself upon a piece of the butter that her kicking had produced during the night, jumped right out the vat, and leaped with joy, all the way home.

As a doctor of optometry, my college transcript is peppered with science courses. Let’s just say I know a little bit about physics. So let’s play doctor for a moment. The form of energy that an object produces because of its motion is called Kinetic Energy. The equation for Kinetic Energy is where m= the mass of the object and v= the speed of the object. So this equation reveals that the kinetic energy of an object is directly proportional to the square of its speed. That means that if we move twice as fast, we produce 4 times as much energy. If we move three times as fast, we produce 9 times as much energy; four times as fast produces 16 times as much energy, and so on.

Kinetic Energy is literally the wind beneath our sails which we produce when we work vigorously and unceasingly towards a goal. Brainwave research indicates that there is a transcendental state that human beings enter into when they wholeheartedly commit to an activity. When immersed in this state, individuals loose track of time and often experience extremely pleasurable feelings and sensations. This transcendental state is called flow. Kinetic Energy is the fuel that transports us there. It propels us to a place beyond passion and beyond purpose into a superlative realm of “never say never, no matter what, do-or-die.” It is unflagging, unfailing raw will.

Kinetic Energy is the reason that we can and must Keep On Kicking!