Turbulent Equilibrium

Big whorls have little whorls 

Which feed on their velocity, 

And little whorls have lesser whorls 

And so on to viscosity.

Self-perception can be interesting. The idea that you conceive of yourself to be a certain way is fascinating to me. And more than that, with all our cognitive biases and skewed perceptions, a lot of self-perception is actually incorrect. This incorrectness too is not necessarily a flaw - it can be merely an evolutionary short-cut towards efficiency. After all, we are made to survive, not to be optimum observers of objective reality as it is. 

Mindfulness is an idea that has rather captured me ever since I heard of it. To be mindful, sthitha prajna (ಸ್ಥಿತ ಪ್ರಜ್ಞ) as my father repeated over and over during my childhood, is an ideal that has always drawn me in. I have never actually taken any deliberate or organised steps towards becoming mindful but once I read about the concept and it became an ideal, I felt that it was a quality that I was imbibing, almost on auto-pilot. The knowledge of something, the act of giving something a name, can be powerful. For example, "mansplaining". You don't necessarily conceive of it on our own, but once you learn the word, you start seeing it often. 

Similarly I felt that my own state of mind and behaviour was titlting towards mindfulness. But alas, it was only self-perception. 

Let me take a small detour into turbulence. Not the kind that plays pinball with aircrafts. Well that is turbulence, but I mean it in a more general, physicsy sense. Turbulence is very precisely defined by physicists as "that kind of thingy which makes everything all swirly and stirs things up". That is what turbulence is, what a turbulent flow is. Turbulence isn't remarkable. In fact, it is the absence of turbulence that is remarkable. Which is why it has a special name - a laminar flow. 

A laminar flow is a flow where everything is very streamlined and smooth. Say a really slowly flowing stream of water. Turbulence on the other hand is choppy, murky. Any fountain, any river, any ocean is always turbulent. Take a pristine, placid lake and throw a tiny, irregularly shaped pebble in it, and you have created some turbulence. Yes, it would fritter away soon, but another pebble, a twig, a leaf, a fish, can spark it all off again. 

So what's turbulent equilibrium? Let's come back to this lake. The act of throwing a rock or a stick into the lake is essentially an act of adding energy to the water of the lake. So why does the lake return to being placid a minute or so later? Where did the energy go? The energy "dissipates". When you churn some liquid (or a gas) around, you dissipate energy because of friction. Much like friction between any two solids, a fluid sloshing around also experiences friction within itself. The liquid is rubbing against itself. This friction is known as viscosity. And the more sloshy, the more frothy the liquid is, the more the churn and the little shapes and patterns, the more the friction, and the more the dissipation of energy. 

In turbulence, you pump more and more and more energy into the liquid, maybe by heating it, maybe by shaking it around vigorously or maybe by some other ingenious way. The fluid shakes around, becomes more and more whorly, more sloshy, because all this energy has to find a way out. In a way, the liquid "shakes off" this excess energy by bouncing around a lot more. But this bouncing around isn't random, it has patterns. The most recognisable is perhaps the "vortex" pattern, like a whirlpool or a tornado. Even the giant red spot of Jupiter is a huge vortex of turbulent fluid. If you want to see more stunning turbulent patterns, you can check out the cloud patterns of Heard Island. And if you're interested in the a great explanation of turbulence and how important it is, I suggest this excellent video by Veritasium. 

Of course, this is all turbulent. What is this equilibrium then? It doesn't occur very often in the world, except in carefully constructed experiments. However, the concept is easy to grasp. It is a situation where whatever extra energy you add to the liquid just makes it more and more swirly and whorly so it can shake this extra energy off. Now imagine you kept supplying energy in a very constant way. And the liquid kept shaking of this energy. This is a rough situation of equilibrium. Whatever you put in, comes out by this creation of whorly thingies and the liquid friction (viscosity) associated with this. 

The mind is like this lake. The pebbles, twigs, the fish - they're all the various things that happen to us in life, the various incidents that we witness, the information that is relayed to us via the senses and our cognition. The mind gets perturbed, agitated, turbulent, due to these objects. 

Mindfulness, from what I understand, is about stillness. Where your mind is a lake that is never perturbed. No matter how many pebbles you throw, no matter how many fish ferret around in the water. No sensory input comes to you as a shock, nothing is a surprise. Perfect equanimity. Perfect equilibrium. This doesn't mean you live separate from the world of your senses. It is not a disengagement from the world, but rather an extra layer, a pause before reaction. As Viktor Frankl says "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.". Mindfulness is about using the power of this space. This would take supreme awareness. 

Before the lockdown, I assumed that I was pretty near, or at least not too far from this state. The lockdown exposed this faulty self-perception quite badly. Agitation! My racing mind is a lake filled with ripples and splashes and waves. What I had thought was tranquility was actually a kind of turbulent equilibrium. Life was predictable. A constant stream of incidents and information. And I had learnt to shuffle, to sway and whorl around to stay in equilibrium. The water in the lake never got too choppy, too agitated, too turbulent that I couldn't handle it. And thus it was a quasi-stable arrangement. 

Not that there is anything wrong with this. If mindfulness was so easy, there wouldn't be a gazillion videos and books and articles on how to do it. Our lives are all turbulent. Those for whom it is in turbulent equilibrium are perhaps the lucky ones. Better than turbulent unequilibrium. 

One agent I would blame is certainly social media. With it's power to lure you into endless scrolling and the stream of new information, with every new word a little pebble is flung into the lake. Even if no pebbles are thrown in, the reverberations of every thrown pebble last a few minutes before the water is placid again. 

It doesn't matter though. It is great that being alone with my thoughts with the swirling chaos all around me, stories of filled hospitals and mass burials in my country of residence, I understand this error in my self-perception. As Jordan Peterson once put it, "Competence is the acceptance of vulnerability". Onward is the only direction worth going. 

And I truly believe the mind is like a muscle. To use the language of Nassim Taleb, it is Anti-Fragile. It reacts positively to stress. You do 10 push-ups today, tomorrow you have the strength to do 11. However, this power is not endless. You suddenly try to lift a huge weight and your back will forget how to lift you up from the floor. A still mind is a strong mind.