poise

 

Yesterday we saw a rise in temperature, and walking the path between the vicarage and the church early in the morning, I noticed that the path was covered with large droplets of water that were holding their shape. Retracing my route forty minutes later, I noticed that the water had held the shape of my footprints, the tread of my Dr Marten boot soles. Indeed, the water held the shape of my footprints all day and is still holding their shape the following day.

I don’t understand the physics, but I know that this has to do with viscosity, ‘a measure of a fluid’s rate-dependent resistance to a change in shape or to movement of its neighbouring portions relative to one another’ (Encyclopaedia Brittanica) and informally known as thickness. At the current temperature range, the water has a high enough viscosity to hold its shape. The SI units of viscosity are newton-seconds per square metre or pascal-seconds, sometimes expressed as poise (1 pascal-second = 10 poise). The poise of water between 5°C-10°C is 0.015-0.013 P.

Poise, as a unit of measurement, is named after the French physicist Jean Léonard Marie Poiseuille. But in English ‘poise’ means a graceful and elegant bearing in a person. And there is something elegant about holding oneself together under pressure. There is something graceful about making the world a more beautiful place by your presence. There can be something graceful and elegant about embracing a gradual change in the face of external forces or circumstances we cannot control. There is something graceful and elegant about bearing witness to the presence of another, passing through your presence in the world, to saying not only ‘I am here’ but also ‘They were here, too.’

There is poise to the viscosity of water, and as I walked the path between vicarage and church, or across the patio outside my back door, yesterday, I trod with reverence for the water, for my recently past self (careful not to break the edges of my earlier footprints) and for the forensic testimony of the interdependence of life. Poise is not a word often associated with a dyspraxic person, but the poise of the water invited me to pay attention to my own poise in the world.