Paradoxical Problems

"That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal."

~Zeno of Elea

Not many people are familiar with Zeno of Elea, a largely forgotten philosopher from ancient Greece.  A contemporary of Socrates, Zeno was a Sophist that urged the questioning of all beliefs and values.  He is remembered primarily for his paradoxes, which follow the method of reductio ad absurdum, which literally means to reduce to the absurd.


The Dichotomy Paradox is one of his most famous paradoxes.  Recorded in Aristotle's work Physics, Zeno states, "That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal".  Obviously, if you are moving anywhere, you are going to reach the half-way point before the final destination can be reached.  However, that is where Zeno's paradox steps in.  Let's say you are going to walk a mile.  Before you walk a mile, you must first walk half of the mile.  Then, before you can finish the trip, you must walk a half of the remaining half of the mile, or one fourth of a mile.  However, walking a fourth of a mile means that you must walk half of that, or an eighth of a mile, before you can reach the final goal.  This pattern continues until only fractions of an inch remain to the destination, yet, it can never be truly reached.  This is because completing the original task requires accomplishing an infinite number of tasks, which in Zeno's mind proves that all motion is an illusion.  


Luckily, we all know that this is bogus.  We all have made it somewhere in our lives - disappointingly enough, I have never seen a person approaching the bathroom in some kind of weird, perpetual journey.  Experience wins over a claim that is the result of over-analyzing a simple phenomenon.  Interestingly enough, this over-analysis of a process has led to the idea of the Quantum Xeno Effect, which claims that constantly measuring a quantum system in its initial state can stop natural processes that would occur otherwise.  All scientific jargon aside, I feel that this can happen in our own lives as well.


How many times do we lose focus of our goals because of their small, trivial components?  Here I am, a senior graduating in May, with nothing standing between me and my future.  But instead of gazing ahead at the amazing grandeur of a full life, I have spent the past couple weeks running around preoccupied with minor details.  Instead of viewing my choice of graduate school as an awesome opportunity and blessing, I have only seen the application process as a giant chore - another in my list of many.  I have been trying too hard to orchestrate the events of my life so much recently, I have realized that I have lost all enthusiasm for the future.  This is the Zeno effect in progress: by focusing so much on each individual step, I am stopping God from shaping my life the way he has planned.  

From this point on, I am looking up.  I will not be engrossed with each footstep of the journey, expecting to reach the finish line by following a path that I determine.  I am simply not that capable.  I will not lose momentum in my life by constantly over-analyzing things - relationships, plans, situations, or anything else.  Instead, I will look to my ultimate goal - to the purpose and life that I was created to fulfill.  God will lead me to this beautiful destination, on a path to that I could never find on my own.

"Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

~Philippians 3:12-14