Counter-intuitive

I like looking at the Moon because it reminds me that I live on a planet in outer space.

As soon as I remember this, I immediately begin imagining outer space, where moons circle planets, planets circle stars, and stars dance about in galaxies.

Last night, standing outside looking at the Moon, I forgot something important. For a minute or two, I got to thinking that the Moon and I were fixed objects, two things stopping late at night to stare at each other. I fooled myself into forgetting that the Moon and I are actually both traveling very, very fast.

In fact, the Moon orbits the Earth at 1022 meters per second, and the Earth orbits the Sun at 29 783 meters per second. (I forget how fast the Sun is moving, but I’ll bet it’s fast, too.)

This is entirely counter-intuitive to what I see night after night. I suppose if I stood still and watched closely for a long time—like some ancient astronomer—I might see the moon wander ever so slowly across the sky. Then, I guess, I might not be fooled into thinking that the moon was a fixed object, but just that it was moving very slow.

Of course, I’d still be wrong. It’s odd how counter-intuitive the Moon is.

The Moon’s apparent slowness is perfectly inconsequential if I’m simply star-gazing or out strolling late at night. But if I ever become an engineer (a “real” one, not just one without borders) trying to land a fellow countryman on the Moon, then I’m sure I’d be awfully interested in not just its velocity, but the Earth’s too, as well as their rotational velocities (at various points on their surfaces), their masses and gravitational pulls, and other important realities.

This transition from simple intuition, to complex counter-intuition is exactly the process I’m experiencing as I’ve started learning more about poverty.

Working for Engineers Without Borders has me thinking very little about forces and velocities and much more about poverty and its implications. One implication is that millions of people in Malawi live in a place similar to where I’m writing right now: a mud-brick, two-room house with a thatched roof on the edge of a village of 72 farming families.

To understand more of these implications I need a good understanding of poverty. Poverty can be a very one-dimensional word to simply describe the fact that some people have very little money compared to other people. But when I started trying to coach a rural Malawian entrepreneur towards running a successful agro-processing operation, I quickly became much more interested in not just how much money he has, but what his environmental assets are, his social networks, his family’s eating preferences, his seasonal work patterns, his mathematic skills, and other important realities.

In order to describe a problem such as poverty—or landing someone on the Moon—accurately, a lot needs to be understood. More challenging still, designing a solution that works, requires even more understanding. Much of this understanding can be counter-intuitive, like how the Moon seems to move slow (but doesn’t), or how Malawians seem not to save their money (though they do, often in the form of fertilizer for next year’s crops).

The Moon regularly reminds me how things can be contrary and hard to understand. It makes me wonder what else I don’t realize is not as it seems, whether it be astronomy, poverty, or anything at all.