Lasers Engaged

Physics is not always thought of as the most exciting class.

I always thought that was weird, because it is what all the prettiest things in the world are made of. Music has waves. Light gives us the colour spectrum. With both gravity and waves, we have dance.

Beauty is tied to the science we learn in physics classes.

So I took the class.

And my teacher did not disappoint. He gave us fun projects where we could make catapults. He used a slinky to show us how waves worked. He dropped textbooks if you fell asleep during one of the “super exciting” physics videos.

I sat at the back of the classroom one day, with my angsty teenage jewelry, as he shot lasers at and through things to show us real examples of reflection and refraction. I held up a ring. He shot a green laser at it—steadily; good hand this man had, steady like the composure he kept in our classes—and it did something different.

The fissures in the ring, a sphere made of quartz, caught the light and it just glowed.

I stared at this glowing green orb. It was so cool to sixteen-year-old me. All the rules about refraction and reflection, and this old rock just made them bend to what it was. The rules still applied, but the nature of this old rock said it was going to do what it was meant to do, even after so many years of pressure.

Now I think that maybe we are the rocks.

We are strong and have stood under pressure. Like quartz, we exist everywhere, but there are so many different types and colours. Some of us have added colours. Some of us are shaped and carved into different forms over time. Some of us have blended with other stones.

But we hold the light, even when it is so strong that we feel attacked or blinded by it.

We glow.

The light is always going to glow from within us, no matter what direction it comes from. Sometimes it is because we have so many fissures of our own.

Teachers are not just any dusty old rock. They are gems. We are blessed to have met gems like that physics teacher once upon a time... and sometimes, we get to ‘meet’ them again on some random teacher page decades later and remember all the fissures that made us into the gems we are.