The pendulum effect and optimism

Have you ever walked into a clock shoppe and noticed the pendulums all swinging together in perfect rhythmic harmony? It's true, when placed together clocks with pendulums will "fall together" into rhythmic unison. It's really amazing when you think about it. Here you have these mechanical instruments, and something draws their functions into harmony. But what is that something? I honestly don't know if I could really understand it if it were explained to me. Yet having seen it, I can accept it as true. Sometimes we don't necessarily have to have proof to believe something as true. We may see it written or hear it said and just have a deep inner knowing that it is so. It resonates with us.

This phenomenon of spontaneous synchronization is called entrainment, and it exists in many different schools of thought. In physics, it is described as "the tendency for two oscillating bodies to lock into phase so that they vibrate in harmony..."

Entrainment exists in numerous forms, from the synchronization of fireflies illuminating to the harmonious resonance of mosquitoes wings flapping. Girls going off to college experience a synchronization of their menstrual cycles to those of their roommates. Our brainwaves will even entrain to the musical rhythms we introduce.

In his studies of heart transplant patients, Dr. Paul Pearsall notes the amazing tendency of a single cardiac cell to throb in unison, not only with another cell that it sides up against, but indeed with the cells of another heart! Before the transplant takes place, the two hearts will begin to beat in unison when placed alongside each other (the heart continues to beat, even after it is removed, for a short period of time). This information leaves me awestruck. What's more is that when holding hands, individuals share cardiac rhythms: their hearts will beat in unison.

As a massage therapist I have also found that, not only heart rates entrain, but the breath rates of the client and therapist do as well. Knowing this, I must be certain that my state of mind is a good one, so that I do not convey any negativity. I must center myself before beginning, and I pay special attention to the music I use as background because, you guessed it, there is such a thing as biomusicology, the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm.

You may consider this interesting and find it awe inspiring, or you may just chalk it up to science and be done with it.

But, consider the practice and concept of Optimism. If entrainment exists in so many forms, where one form of energy entrains itself to another in a beautiful example of Nature's interwoven cloth, then how might one's state of mind and general mode of being affect another's?

Do you notice how the emotional climate of the room physically changes when someone walks into the room with a joyous baby? It is transformed.

Optimism is contagious, but so is pessimism. Optimism feels good. Pessimism, not so much.

When a pendulum swings, it has two extremes. Optimism feels good. Pessimism, not so much.

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit." Helen Keller

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