Light

noun: brightness; adjective: not heavy

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For this post, I shall endeavour to shed some light on the word “light”. As well as being a word with multiple direct meanings, “light” carries moral and religious connotations. Don’t worry: it’s not as heavy as it sounds!

In casual conversation the term “lightweight” is broadly derogatory, implying one can only manage small loads. But there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest using lighter weights over a longer time is just as efficient as using heavier weights to build strength, and I’ve never found lightweight sportsmen and women any less impressive than their counterparts in other weight divisions… Odd. I wonder where the association came from?

Moving on to another meaning of “light”, our bodies are designed to run at peak efficiency during daylight hours, while resting and recuperating at night when it’s too dark to see clearly. While modern technology, and the efforts of our ancestors 1.5 million years ago, have enabled us to see at night, we still perform better in almost every way in daylight. I won’t bore you here with how detrimental night work is to the human body and mind, however, I will say it’s pretty clear that living nocturnally is not conducive to a long, healthy life!

I’m no biologist, but we can get vitamin D from our diet, and the night-vision thing was dealt with hundreds-of-thousands of years ago, so there has to be something more to our compulsion for sunlight, right? I seem to hear (and read) the phrase “circadian rhythm” quite a bit, these days. It’s your “internal clock”, and one of the things it reacts most strongly to is – you guessed it – light. Too much artificial light at night can keep you up even when you’re tired , and those pesky rays from the Sun when you’re trying to sleep during the day can cut the quality of said sleep dramatically. For quality over quantity, better to sleep at night and seek the light during the daytime. Speaking of “seeking the light”…

It’s not a phrase that would generally be used as literally as I did before, is it? It tends to be more of a religious thing. Finding God, or enlightenment, or ascending to a higher plane of consciousness; whatever works for you… But why does light come into it? Because it’s one of the fastest things we can measure, so among the hardest to catch? I doubt it. Biblical metaphors have been around far longer than those particular scientific discoveries regarding the speed of light, surely? And why do we describe those struggling emotionally or psychologically as being in a “dark place” or a “black hole”? Perhaps a testament to mankind’s fear of the unknown?

We are curious creatures, aren’t we? While many are fearful of the unknown, there is also a natural curiosity towards it, a desire to learn, to discover, to shed some light on the subject. While a decline in the feline population is a common warning against our curious nature, this search for understanding is responsible for many a scientific discovery, including the lights allowing us to safely traverse the darkness.

Well, dear reader, don’t worry too much about chasing the light, as you’ll never catch it, lightweight or no. Just don’t forget it’s there, beyond the black hole, even if you can’t see it right now. Be happy in yourself, and don’t let those pesky thoughts weigh you down!

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