The Fascinating, Fulfilling Ins and Outs of Shape Shifting

I just saw in the Wall Street Journal that some Chinese scientists have developed a sheet of polymer that can fold itself into different shapes.  Half material, half machine, the substance is essentially a synthetic shape shifter.  The invention remembers its previous forms and can accumulate the changes it makes.  So it can transform itself.  And it can evolve.

I read the article over and over, with no small share of awe.  With a change of temperature, the programmable polymer morphed into the form of a boat, then a bird, then a pinwheel and back again.  Depending on its environment, it origamied its way into a new self. 

The idea of shape shifting is extraordinarily alien and yet also utterly familiar.  Shape shifting is already a part much of our lives.  The natural world shifts shape around us.  A liquid river freezes solid in winter.  That skeleton of a tree outside my window was once a lush orb that will grow green again someday.  People shape shift, too.  In our working lives we may change careers or strike out in new directions that render our previous professional forms outwardly unrecognizable.  

If you're a working parent, you may feel yourself to be a shape shifter on a daily basis as you move from the role of professional to parent and back again.  All this shifting is less elegant than what happens in a lab.  Years ago I was on a work conference call at home on a snow day, and my younger daughter kept slipping me notes asking me if it was normal for her guinea pig to be defecating in the plastic house in its cage.  I felt suspended in time and space, one self on the phone and the other holding a note about a pet rodent's bathroom habits.  A ridiculous example, of course, but that in-between state between roles - the gaps in shifting to and from - is worth our attention.  I'm lousy at it.  Every Spring, I vow to notice the moment the trees go from bare to buds of electric green.  I never do see it happen.  Once day looks like winter, the next nature has made its shift.  When was that suspended state from one season to the next?  To me, the mysterious heart of the Chinese experiment is not in the boat or the bird or the pinwheel but the morass among those states.  

When we shift shape, our essence is the same, like that river or tree or sheet of Chinese polymer.  We've composed ourselves into what is called for, either within ourselves or through our circumstances.  We look different from the outside.  But we are also inwardly changed by the changing.  Like the polymer, we retain the memory of our other forms.  They compound as we shift and though they may not be visible to others, they are slowly accumulating within ourselves, forming something else entirely: a fantastically mottled spirit that reflects every shape we have taken.

In the case of the polymer, the scientific breakthrough was the accumulation of changes.  That is the human miracle as well.  We take on a new role or grasp a new challenge.  We shift our shape, and it comes with a new name.  Manager.  Mother.  Director.  Sister.  And in the gaps between, if we pay close attention, there may be moments of confusion or even months or years of muddled transformation.  They are to be savored as the real state of invention, when we become something new even as we retain what we were.  They enable the accumulation that makes us a greater whole with every shift.

It's the New Year, a time when many of us think of the ways in which we want to transform.  The new polymer material, says Robert Lee Hotz in the Journal, "allows desirable changes to accumulate, adding up to a new permanent form that is more than any one of its stages."  In 2016, I wish for all of us not just positive change but something more: the collective benefit of the time that is spent in the mysterious, miraculous midst of changing.