Zeno's Paradox

Well, its the time of year when a bearded man in red takes his reindeer around the world stopping at every house that has a chimney. Of course, this is impossible, because as we all know motion is an illusion

Zeno was a pre- Socratic philosopher living in the western region of Greece some 2500s years ago. He is known today for his paradoxes which make a case that nothing can move. His paradoxes do not concern his internal logic but of his logic against the observable world where we see motion all around us.

There a couple of ways he framed his paradoxes but at the root, they all follow this general idea. If you were to walk a mile, before you completed your walk, you would need to walk a half-mile. But before you walk that half mile you need to walk a quarter-mile. To walk a quarter-mile you have to walk an eighth of a mile, and so on forever. We continually have to move half the distance of any distance before we can arrive at our original destination distant. Since the process of breaking any movable distance into a half distant can go on forever we would have to perform an infinite amount of steps before we could take any steps. This means unless we are Chuck Norris we could never accomplish the infinity of steps any movement would require, thus all motion is an illusion.

Of course, when we step out of this thought pattern we can clearly observe that motion is real. We move, we go places. Zeno would have flunked calculus and gym class, but he can give us an interesting lens to examining movement through.

Bodies despite the ramblings of Zeno are meant to move. They are meant to move in a variety of ways that almost always exceeds what modern life challenges them to. Just as we understand how repetitive stress injuries work we also need to understand repetitive stagnation injuries. Injuries that are caused by not moving. When we over perform a few motions and neglect all the other ways we have evolved to move our muscular becomes out of balance.

To counter this I recommend we develop some movement practice. Martial arts, dance, tai chi yoga, anything where there is no goal other than to fine-tune our movement. Places where we can self examine where we are weak and where we are strained. To stretch what needs to be stretched and to strengthen what needs to be strengthened.

When we are engaged in movement only for the sake to move we can reflex back on Zeno's fundamental miscomprehension of physics. We can slow down every moment we make and divide them into as many sub moments as we want. We can then examine each of these sub-movements to see how we can make the aspect of our movement more fluid, or more stable, or improved in any other way.

An example of this I started working with is swimming. While swimming should be one continuous fluid motion it hard to improve our technique when we are engaged in such a complicated action. So elite swimmers and swim coaches break down Their motion into phases. The freestyle has 4 stages of movement concerning the upper body alone. Each of this sub- motions are places where we can tweak our biomechanical habits before reintegrating the sums of our movements. To briefly summarize the steps of swimming, there is the catch ( where our hand enters the water), the pull (where we pull our arms then the water), the exit ( where our hand moves past the hips to leave the water), and the recovery (where our arm moves back into position to re submerge itself).

We can analyze the biomechanics of each of these submovements. This can give us the needed insight to make physical adjustments to improve to flow better in whatever movement we are doing. By doing this I noticed I was doing the catch-all wrong. It's most efficient to have our arm enter the water with more of a bend in our elbow so it goes straight down rather than trying to fully extend our arm. By doing it this way we can use our forearm as well as our hand to pull water behind us.

By refining one aspect of in this case swimming, I was able to improve upon the whole in a way that was much easier than if I had not the ability to break it down. So while we don't have to break down all movement into such an infinity that we create inertia we can use this strategy to repattern our selves in the new year.

Anthony Bruni