I’m the first person awake in the morning in my house. I get up before everyone so I can get ready and then wake everyone else so they can get ready. It’s been that way for as long as I remember.Most of the time the morning routine is…routine. However, every once in a while there’s a surprise. Like yesterday.My sons—aged ten and eight—share a bedroom. When I wake them in the morning I sit on the edge of the bed and talk to them for a couple of minutes while they become accustomed to the light. I always like these few minutes of the day, even though they’re not usually too talkative at 6:40 in the morning.But yesterday when I woke them up, my ten-year-old asked me, “How do you get energy out of darkness?” I thought that either I was half asleep or he was because he made no sense.I asked him to clarify.“Well you get energy out of light from the sun. But what about darkness? How do we get energy out of darkness?”I thought about it for a moment, and then tried my best scientific answer. “Well, darkness has no energy. That’s why it’s dark. If it had energy it’d be light, like the sun.”My son wasn’t deterred. “But what if there’s energy in the darkness and we just don’t know it. We have to figure out how to get the energy out of the darkness.”
He was adamant about it. I asked why he wanted to get energy out of darkness if we already knew how to get it out of light. “Well I have a plan for this amusement park, and it’s closed all day, but then as soon as it gets dark out it comes alive. So I need to find out how to get energy from the darkness so that the amusement park can run itself at night.”Holy cow! The dude had an entire rationale for why he’d been thinking of getting energy from darkness. I suddenly felt like a mental sloth and woefully inadequate as a father. My ten-year-old had bigger thoughts before seven a.m. than I’d probably have all day.His brother wasn’t having any of it that particular morning though: “Don’t ask me, I’m only nine years old,” he said, rounding up the two months remaining until his birthday.I had no great explanation to give my son. I’ve thought about it since then, and I wish that I knew how to get energy from darkness, but I don’t. If I did I’d probably be working in some lab somewhere right now instead of typing a blog post on my couch. My son didn’t seem too disappointed that I didn’t know how to get the energy. I suspect he’s already on to the fact that I don’t know everything.However, the more I thought about his question, the more it seemed to apply to everyday life. How do we get energy from darkness?I’m not talking about literal energy or literal darkness. But there are figurative comparisons that could be made using the energy/darkness idea.I’ve read that when some people are in a deep depression they literally cannot get out of bed to do anything. They have no drive to do so. Isn’t whatever therapy is used to help people in those situations sort of getting energy from darkness?Or even if we think of situations less extreme than that, things that we all deal with. We all go through tough times, or have bad days. Sometimes it can get a little overwhelming. Perhaps it would help if we just asked ourselves how we could get energy out of those dark times.Often dark times are dark because they’re out of our control. If we could control those times, we wouldn’t let them be dark. But while we can’t control the darkness, maybe we can control the energy. Maybe we can find something interspersed within the darkness that can provide a spark, an inferno, that will help carry us through the dark times.And eventually the darkness lifts and the sun returns. Then the energy becomes easy to find. And if we’re smart, we’ll store some of the energy to help get us through the next period of darkness.Because it’s never easy to find energy in darkness.PREVIOUS POST: The Two Great Moms in My LifeIF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: Professional Video Game Player is a Thing+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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