Living life in Schrödinger’s blender
Today, I feel like a hydra or a sponge living in a blender. Both are examples of basic lifeforms which, despite external effort to break them, will not die when put through a blender but instead return to their basic form. By virtue of some rather ethically suspect experiments (not by me), this has been shown empirically. As a PhD researcher, I am curious to know who signed off the ethics of that…
I am not unbreakable, far from it, but my point is the PhD process often feels like a rebuild. Life lived in a blender. However, the process of PhD progression becomes a fight with one’s innermost way to be. Like the hydra or the sponge therefore, one must withstand the blender and rebuild again. Unlike these more basic lifeforms, the PhD student’s form should not remain unchanged.
Today is another rebuild for me, feeling all battered and bruised post a tough destruction of three months work. The blender was on full power on Friday, with my supervisors turning the switch. It was a pulse-blast, just the headlines of what is coming my way. For background, I submitted a large lump of first draft thesis writing in mid-January – at 20,000 words probably too big to cram into that one blender. I then spent much of the last two weeks much like Schrödinger’s cat. My work was both alive and dead – with possibility of being whole or in pieces – both at the same time. The actual state would be dependant upon external measure of how those words would be viewed. With the box now open, blender lid opened enough to peer in, the rebuild will once again begin. So is the way of the PhD progression, and the cycles of form and necessary reconstruction.
Fresh from the latest of so many intervention therefore, I know I can survive being blended once again. I am grateful. The new clarity and targeted aspects of change give me the signposts towards coming back around again. Like the simple structure of the hydra, I am therefore blessed with the gift of being alive whether found temporarily blended or mended. The life of the metaphorical hydra-sponge cat that remains alive yet in a state that is both pulped or whole at the same time. The PhD life, lived in Schrödinger’s blender, where change is forever invited in.
to be continued…