What Watching The Witcher Taught Me About Life and Science
My first introduction to Netflix had some surprising benefits, but perhaps not what you might think
First, let me explain. Before all this lockdown stuff began, my relationship with my TV was primarily to watch NFL football and my own movies. I rarely, if ever, engaged in much else.
TV is not a priority around here. If I wasn’t traveling (the operative word is wasn’t) then I was in training. If not that, then I was writing. I can’t write with noise on. What most folks seemed to be consumed by (Tudors, GOT, most popular TV shows) was not and still isn’t in my wheelhouse.
Enter our Conditions. I had already shut down my DirecTV, whose primary purpose the last two years was to allow me to witness the Denver Broncos’ slide into NFL mediocrity. When I got back from Africa on March 11th, I had the widescreen and two laptops. You can see what’s coming. My social media guru convinced me to give Netflix a shot. He recommended The Witcher.
If you accused me of having my head in the sand for not having a clue who Henry Cavill is, you’d be right. Sands of Egypt, the sands of a hundred beaches, the sands of Mafia Island, the sands of Madagascar. No idea who this mega-hunk was.
Nor could I make hide nor hair of the plot of The Witcher. I still can’t make hide nor hair of the plot. It’s incoherent. Shy of enjoying Cavill’s looks I was perpetually trying to figure out if we’d just done a flashback (yes, apparently ) because some queen, who committed suicide early on, was suddenly alive again. Call me stupid but it really helps to have a little warning on where the hell we are in a timeline.
But here’s the piece I loved because it speaks to balance and natural law.
As The Witcher is a mystical piece, there are of course witches, or mages, and lots and lots of magic. Early on there’s a scene where female mage apprentices are being asked to lift a rock. There’s a flower on one side of their lecterns, a rock on the other.
The successful girls lift the rock. The flower dies. One girl watches her left hand wither horribly as her rock rises.
Tissaia, who is instructing them, explains that there is an inevitable exchange. Energy used has to be drawn from something. The flower has to die. This is an essential lesson in the natural law about energy exchange/force.
For science and physics buffs, this is child’s play:
For those who have difficulty recognizing that science indeed exists, and in fact, does rule the Natural world along with a great many other things, this is a lovely and lyrical way of explaining that something has to give for you and me to get.
We see this at work everywhere, at all levels:
As in conservation and environment: the Earth has had to give up her animals and resources and much of her beauty for humans to have have have have have have. Not all, but too many. For the 1%, let’s not go there.
As in money: Jeff Bezos has been enriched by billions as his employees are bilked of their time, health and treasure, being injured, often forced to work in dangerous conditions, and exposed to illness or let go illegally for reporting same. Those employees give so that we can get our packages. They give so that Bezos can get even richer.
As in weight loss: the body has to give up energy in the form of calories, and as long as the body’s inhabitant doesn’t overly replenish to the same extent, the body slowly but surely releases size in exchange for output. (simplified, but you get my drift)
To build muscle: the body’s muscles must tear, give up their integrity, for more muscle to be gained. I must give up time and effort, in order to get a better body through that work.
As in ignorance: the self has to give up beliefs, ideas and prejudices in exchange for greater knowledge, understanding, and perhaps, perspective. If I want to rise above my ignorance I must release my attachments to the beliefs and ideas that limit me. Give up my attachments to get freedom.
As in love: I have to give up my time, my effort, and my glorious, self-righteous isolation in order to enjoy the company of another. I must give in order to get.
Something has to diminish for something else to grow.
In one way or another, something has to be “paid” for something else to be gotten at every single level. What diminishes may be a very good thing: my loneliness, in order to have love; my ignorance, in order to gain wisdom.
Whether on the cosmic or micro scale, the business or interpersonal scale, we are always in exchange.
Just the simple visual of watching a flower die so that an apprentice magician can lift a rock is an exquisite lesson in Natural Law.
In a world where we are accustomed to getting, acquiring and accumulating, we don’t always acknowledge that something has to be given, or forfeited, or in effect, “paid.”
Marcel Proust wrote:
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
In other words, I have to let go of the rope that ties my ship to the dock and my relative safety therein for me to see differently, experience differently, voyage to the new lands of the mind. I “pay” with my discomfort, whether that’s letting go of a tired and dysfunctional idea or a tired and dysfunctional relationship.
We get nothing for free.
We might understand that idea, but we don’t like it. Which is precisely why we as a nation are happy to buy fitness equipment but don’t want to pay the price of time, discipline and effort to get fit.
We will enter a marriage, but we don’t often want to pay the hard price of walking through conflict, forgiveness, bad times and difficulties, to say nothing of fidelity.
We want to be seen as wise and influential and badass, but all too often we don’t want to pay the steep prices of time, effort, failure, loss and deep personal pain to actually earn wisdom, influence and the title of badass. I hear this all the time with people asking me how I “get” to do what I do in the world as though there were some desk where they could apply for a job as an adventure traveler. Nope. I paid with forty years and thousands of dollars to subsidize my own adventures and thousands of hours at the gym to get in shape to survive those adventures.
While I might have gotten horribly lost- and still am-in the woods in The Witcher, it was fun not only to enjoy Cavill’s considerable guns but also the beauty of simple science explained through magical alchemy.
For those who have difficulty believing in science, it’s just magic named. For example, the only reason you can get from point A to point B by airplane is magic. Or, science, otherwise named Bernoulli’s Principle, which describes the movement of fluid, including air, or lift. No lift, no flight. No flight, seriously nasty road kill on the tarmac. About half an inch of suction created on the leading edge of an airplane’s wing is all it takes to keep you aloft, no matter how heavy the craft.
Science, magic, makes no difference. It’s still laws of nature. Just like greed sucks the life out of people. Something/someone has to give so that the greedy can have.
While I struggle through certain parts of The Witcher while I am on my yoga mat struggling through my stretches, I am reminded that laws are laws. A rose by any other name, in other words.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you think those laws apply to you. Think they don’t? Try leaping off a cliff without any kind of proper airfoil. Try heading around the world to find the edge where you are supposed to fall off. Try trying to breathe normally at high altitude. Oxygen just kinda disappears up there. Call it magic. You still can’t fucking breathe, Skeezix.
Not respecting Natural laws (science)has consequences.
Which is a state of mind many of my fellow humans seem to prefer to live in these days. As in, the rules don’t apply to me. Like the four very young people crammed in together inches apart at my Safeway’s checkout last night, completely ignoring the signs on the floor requesting social distancing for other’s safety, and theirs.
Please. Be my guest. The laws apply. Just as these Conditions are showing. The laws of science apply to you whether you believe them or not.
We were given a world, and magic, and science. They are all tools. The Amazonian shaman’s bark is aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid by any other name. It still reduces pain, inflammation and thins blood and saves lives. Magic from the hands of a shaman, everyday simple meds, proven science, in our medicine bottles. We ignore them at our peril. And indeed, peril is precisely where we are right now, for ignoring the most basic of laws, clearly demonstrated in The Witcher.
You and I cannot keep taking and taking and taking without paying a terrible price.
