Ode to Water

It all starts with water.

Take a glass of water. Can you divide that into two glasses? It’s not terribly important if they contain the same amount of water, so the question is just whether the water can be divided from one glass into two.

Of course it can, you think.

How about ten glasses? Well, sure. You just need to be a bit more careful and not slosh too much water around while you’re pouring the first few glasses, so there’s some left for the last few glasses.

Well, okay. How about a thousand glasses? This one might give you pause, but then you remember medicine droppers, and how you can sort of slurp up a minuscule amount of fluid from one place, and then squirt it into another spot.

Could you do this for a million tiny glasses, though? What about a billion tiny glasses? Is there some limit where you can’t get any smaller, like a minimum amount of water?

This little thought experiment is just the sort of thing young Andrew was thinking about whenever he was around hoses, tubs, or any water source.

I was fascinated by the way water flowed. Liquids behaved very differently from solids, and I wanted to understand everything about them.

Here I am, feeling the sinus pressure build up. Why should my nose, mouth, and ears all feel this pressure when I do this? I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out:

Of course, not all of my early experiments had the same level of merit:

This may have been my earliest obsession, and the limited photographic evidence from my first year of life suggests so:

I don’t think I was busy deriving the existence of atoms, as the thought experiment I opened with is destined to do, but I was nevertheless certainly trying to learn about the world.

Bath time was laboratory time right from the start. I won’t share any of these pics of myself, but they certainly exist. Thanks, mom!

Sometimes, my fascination could lead to conflicts about who controlled the water. I was never immune to these sorts of power struggles.

In sum, water has been with me from the very beginning.

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Quick side note: this is the first solo Ode I’ve written, but I’ve worked on others with

Michael Woudenberg

, including An Ode to Beer and An Ode to Whiskey over at

Polymathic Being

, and An Ode to Coffee right here on GF Writes. We also both worked on Ode to Coffee with

Birgitte Rasine

of

The Cacao Muse

. These were delightful experiences with multiple minds working on them—go check them out next if you’re up for some adventure!