Knowing, Understanding

In high school I was an aspiring physicist. I loved all natural sciences but in particular I loved physics. What did I like about physics? Now that I think about it, I think there were various internal and external factors like making me feel smart or things just making sense in a systemic way.

To me physics was such a marvelous collection of human knowledge accumulated over time. It felt like an entire codex landing in my brain in the form of equations that took me from the most practical experiences in the world to the most unimaginable experiences in the world.

My teachers have all taught me how to understand physics by deriving all of the formulas from scratch. They would explain to me how scientists in the past have had observations based on real life activity and would hypothesize a model. Then they would experiment on it to figure out if the model could predict an outcome from a simulated situation.

By understanding the story behind each of the equations I didn’t have to memorize anything; physics was never about memorization for me. Even if I forgot what the value of G was, even if I forgot what the value of c was it didn’t matter that much because those were just constants. Even if I forgot kinematic equations I remember being able to derive them with some time.

Around this time I had an opportunity to go to Korea. It was the first time in a very very long time, and I was excited to meet my Korean friends in my home town of Busan. We finally met and talked about life as high schoolers in Korea and America, and we got to talking about what our passions were.

I talked about physics and my friend told me, “oh physics is sorta cool but there’s too many things to memorize”. I remember just being baffled by that statement; “what do you mean you have to memorize? Physics is all about understanding”. My friend was just as confused as I was.

In the Korean education system everything was just memory memory memory. There is no demand for understanding because the point is to cram everything as much as possible in preparation for the big exam for college entrance once a year. I knew that SAT’s worked differently in Korea but I didn’t know that it would impact the experience of learning about physics.

I can’t fathom living in my friend’s reality, and my friend can’t fathom living in mine. But we coexist in the same room as we’re talking about our differences.

With my friend it’s easy to just stop talking about physics. But when we have difficult conflicts in our lives, it’s important to remember that it’s very possible that the other person simply cannot see things from your perspective because they aren’t living your life.

We forget just how multi-layered life is. We don’t know what kind of TV shows another person grew up watching because their parents left it on. We don’t know what kind of lullabys they grew up hearing. We don’t know what kinds of arguments they grew up in their households.

We don’t know what their first core memories are. We don’t know what kind of a societal pressure experienced in their homeland. We don’t know how their family dynamics have made them behave a certain way. We don’t know what kind of insecurities they have or the fears they have.

Hell, do you even know all of those things about yourself?

As an immigrant I get to experience a very simple fact of life: even if we start off in completely unrelated, we can live together in harmony. Even in the greatest differences we can find a common ground. In this day and age it seems that the strongest players in the world want to make nations that have greater homogeneity, reducing the differences between people.

But I think unity and peace is a lot like happiness. If you cannot find unity within differences, even inside unity you will find differences. If uniform, homogeneous societies were indeed better shouldn’t homogenous countries like Korea be the best country in the world?

The onus isn’t just on the politicians and the policy makers. Are you finding peace and unity within yourself, within your family, and within your community?