How To Sit In A Chair

“If one wishes to bake an apple pie from scratch, one must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Depending on your perspective, this may be a simple proposition. It may be such a ridiculously simple idea that you’ve never thought about it at all. You may even be cursing my name for bringing it up in the first place.

But since I exist safely out of arm’s reach, for the moment, I’ll endeavour to look a little deeper and find some hidden meaning in so simple an action. I don’t know where we’re going, but perhaps the journey will reveal something about ourselves.

For nearly half a century, I’ve been my own worst enemy, far worse than any man could ever have been to the course of my life. Through luck or chance, though certainly not by design, I’ve muddled my way to a point where I need two hands to count my blessings. Is my glass half full or half empty? It depends on the day.

I’ve always been a dreamer; a pie-in-the-sky, excuse-making machine. Do I know what I want? Do I have a five-year plan? Am I the picture of ambition?

Well, no.

But I know precisely what I don’t want, as though that consolation is going to get me somewhere.

It’s all about intention. What do you want? If you can’t answer that simple question with something more substantial than an inventory of your refrigerator, you may have some trouble sitting in the chair of your life.

Some of you may already be wondering where I’m headed with this. Others may be looking suspiciously toward the door. And some of you may simply be thinking about what’s in the refrigerator.

So what does sitting in a chair have to do with physics, psychology and microbiology?

(Kinesiology having a relatively obvious connection.)

Can’t we just sit in the chair and be done with it? Can’t we move on to bigger and better things, spending our time and effort on subjects more worthy of our attention?

I say no.

No, we can’t just sit in the chair.

We have to explore the process, understand the mechanics and, eventually, consider what it means.

While intention shapes the manner of our lives, giving us substance and perspective, there are deeper questions—some larger, some smaller—but all things considered, their impact may be much the same.

Every act, every thought, every heartbeat is a small wonder of science. On that premise alone, perhaps each deserves a little more of our attention.

So, let’s sit down. It should be simple.

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Before we can fully understand the process of sitting in a chair, we should consider a few things that might have a potentially devastating effect on the outcome.

Most obviously: is there a chair to sit in?

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume there is. It appears to have shape and mass. It may be large and upholstered with billowy cushions, or Spartan and cold, made of steel with pivoting hinges, making it easy to fold and convenient to store.

Whatever its form, the chair must obey certain laws. It must occupy space. It must have mass. It must remain where we expect it to remain, at least until somebody moves it. It must be sufficiently sturdy to support the ass who wants to sit in it.

In other words, before we can sit in a chair, the chair has to exist.

But what exactly is a chair?

Is it simply a structure of wood, metal, fabric and springs whose primary purpose is to support us and house our gluteus maximus? Is it an object of beauty? An artifact of history? A piece of furniture? Is it necessary, or bourgeois?

Any way you look at it, a chair is one thing above all others: It’s a place to sit down.

And yet, even that simple definition begins to fall apart when we look at the history of the chair.

For much of human history, a chair was not simply somewhere to park one’s backside. The right to sit in a particular chair could signify rank, authority or social standing. Thrones were reserved for kings. Particular seats at a table could signify importance. Even today, we speak of the head of the table, the chair of a committee, the judge’s bench and the seat of power.

The chair itself, of course, remains entirely indifferent to all of this.

It does not care whether the person sitting upon it is a king or a commoner, a saint or a scoundrel. It knows nothing of humility or honour, justice or cruelty. It simply supports whatever happens to be sitting on it.

The chair is impartial. It is stoic. It is dependable.

And it sits there, quietly, while we make an extraordinary fuss about ourselves. Perhaps that’s worth considering.

We tend to take chairs for granted. They’re so common that we barely notice them, despite the fact that they accompany us wherever our lives take us. We sit at tables, desks, computers and dinner parties. We sit in classrooms, offices, theatres, waiting rooms and automobiles.

We sit to work.

We sit to rest.

We sit to eat.

We sit to think.

And eventually, we sit down in a chair and begin wondering what a chair actually is.

This is where things become complicated.

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It is our creation and, like everything else we see, it’s made from the same stuff as you and me.

Look around you. What do you see? Furniture? Possibly a chair or two? Small objects, big objects, soft things, hard things, people, animals, plants, earth, and even stars if you happen to look up.

You are surrounded by the accumulated consequences of a universe that has been doing this sort of thing for a very long time.

Every particle, every atom, every molecule, every cell, every thing you can see and touch has its origins in that long cosmic history. It seems strange to use a human convention like “years” to describe the evolution of the cosmos, but such is our lot. We measure the universe with clocks because we don’t have anything better.

Roughly 13.8 billion years have passed since the early universe began expanding from an extremely hot, dense state. Hydrogen and helium formed early on, and stars later forged many of the heavier elements from which planets, chairs, and eventually people would be assembled.

This process was crushingly violent, though cosmically slow.

Over immense stretches of time, gravity gathered clouds of gas together. Stars formed. Inside those stars, nuclear reactions produced elements that would eventually become part of planets, rocks, oceans, chairs and us.

We are, quite literally, made from the debris of stars.

There is something wonderfully humbling about that. The chair beneath you and the person sitting in it have radically different histories, radically different structures and radically different purposes, yet both are temporary arrangements of the same ancient material.

The chair is no less subject to the laws of nature than you are. It doesn’t know that it’s a chair. It doesn’t know that you’re sitting on it. It simply exists, obeying the same physical laws that govern everything else.

And this is where things get strange.

When you look at a chair, it appears to be a solid object. You can touch it. You can sit on it. You can stub your toe on it, and I can assure you that your toe will not care about the philosophical implications.

But matter is not quite what it appears to be.

If you close your eyes and imagine the atomic structure of the chair, do you picture tiny particles packed together like a crowd at a concert, shoulder to shoulder, with no room to move?

You shouldn’t.

At the atomic scale, there is an astonishing amount of space.

A useful, if imperfect, way to imagine this is to enlarge an atom until its nucleus is roughly the size of a small object in the middle of a football field. The electrons would then occupy a region extending vastly farther outward, say several city blocks, while most of the space between them would contain no ordinary matter at all.

That’s a lot of nothing.

And yet, somehow, you’re sitting on it.

The chair feels solid because the matter that makes up the chair interacts with the matter that makes up you. Electromagnetic forces prevent the atoms in your backside from simply passing through the atoms in the seat.

Which is fortunate.

Imagine trying to explain to the emergency room doctor that you fell through your chair because you had recently developed a better understanding of atomic physics.

Perspective is everything.

At our ordinary scale, the chair is solid, useful and reassuringly resistant to penetration. At the atomic scale, it is something altogether stranger: a vast arrangement of particles and fields, separated by enormous distances relative to their size and held together by forces we don’t ordinarily notice.

If we were naturally small enough to see the chair at that scale, we would have no use for it as a chair.

But we aren’t.

We live at the scale where a chair is a chair, a floor is a floor, and gravity has the good manners to keep our backside from drifting through the ceiling.

For the moment, that’s probably all we need to know.

Because now that we’ve established that the chair is made of atoms, and that those atoms are mostly empty space, we have to ask an even more troublesome question:

What’s keeping the whole thing where it is?

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Where would we be without Sir Isaac Newton?

Well, probably right where we are. We’d just be a little worse off, is all.

Where would we be without gravity?

Better yet: what would we be without gravity?

This would be very different indeed.

Gravity is one of the fundamental facts of our existence. It binds us to the Earth, keeps the Earth in orbit around the Sun, and helps hold stars, planets and galaxies together. It dictates a great deal about what we can and can’t do.

It also gives us a very good reason not to step off a cliff.

Gravity is not quite the simple, invisible force that Newton imagined it to be. Einstein later showed us that gravity is better understood as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime. But whatever language we use to describe it, the practical result is the same: here on Earth, things fall down.

And that simple fact has had enormous consequences.

Without gravity, clouds of gas would not have gathered into stars and planets in the way they did. Without gravity, the Earth would not have formed as the world we know it. Gravity helped bring together the raw materials from which our planet, our oceans and eventually ourselves were constructed.

But gravity doesn’t simply build things.

It also places restrictions upon them.

Every living thing on Earth has to deal with the fact that the ground is, quite insistently, below it.

For plants, this means growing upward while maintaining enough structure to support themselves. For animals, it means carrying their own weight around. On land, unlike in water, there is no surrounding fluid to provide much of that support. Our bones, muscles and connective tissues are all part of the solution.

Even flight is not really a matter of defeating gravity. Birds don’t trick gravity. They generate lift, using wings and air to produce an upward force sufficient to counter their weight. Hollow or lightweight bones can help reduce mass in many flying birds, but the bird still has to negotiate the same gravitational field as everything else.

Gravity has shaped the chair too.

The chair is, in a sense, an answer to a problem that gravity has been presenting to us for our entire existence.

We get tired.

Gravity keeps pulling.

Eventually, we sit down.

The chair is there to support us.

Its structure may have four legs, three legs, one central pedestal or, occasionally, something that looks as though the designer simply got bored halfway through the process. It may have a seat, a back, armrests or none of these things. Whatever its particular arrangement, the chair has to support our weight without collapsing beneath us.

It isn’t really defying gravity.

It is negotiating with it.

The floor pushes upward, the chair pushes upward, and our weight pushes downward. When those forces are balanced, we remain where we are.

This is no big deal, you say.

And you’re right.

Most everything around us is negotiating with gravity in one way or another.

But what if gravity were very different?

Imagine a planet with almost no gravity at all. There would be no reason for life to evolve in quite the same way it did here. There would be no need to constantly support our own weight, because there would hardly be any weight to support.

Perhaps life would take forms we would find almost impossible to recognize.

Amorphous blobs of proto-matter, floating, hovering and clinging to the atmosphere. They resemble giant three-dimensional pools of toxic waste. They’re grey, sticky in texture and seemingly lifeless, until you hear it.

It’s quiet at first.

A low rumble, like the infancy of some great gurgling burp in the belly of a bar-stool football fan.

The rumbling gets louder. It creates sound waves that resonate deep inside you, and soon it becomes a deafening boom, over and over. Through all this invisible commotion, you finally see it.

The grey blobs of matter begin to move.

Slowly at first, but they pick up speed, moving away from you, changing shape and propelling themselves through the atmosphere by sound waves.

Of course, this is speculation. We have never observed life on a zero-gravity world, and we don’t know what evolution would actually produce under such conditions.

But that’s the fun of it.

Change the rules, and you change the possibilities.

On a world with very little gravity, natural selection would not have the same physical constraints to work with. There would be little need for heavy skeletal structures, strong supporting limbs or legs designed to carry a body across a solid surface. Locomotion might take forms that are completely alien to us.

Perhaps the inhabitants would spend their entire lives floating above the surface of their world.

And consider the chair.

What possible use could there be for a chair in such an environment?

To confine oneself to the rigid formality of furniture, when the atmosphere itself is more than supportive and much more appealing, would seem utterly absurd.

Though perhaps not.

If a higher intelligence evolved in such a place, would it not still have a need to structure and organize the things in its environment? Would it collect objects? Build things? Create artificial spaces?

We don’t know.

This may seem like a trivial convenience, but it isn’t.

A world in which things generally stay where you put them is a world in which you can accumulate things.

You can put a tool on a shelf and expect it to remain there. You can stack stones, build a house, store food, arrange furniture, collect books and fill a room with objects that have no intention of wandering away.

Our entire material culture depends, to some extent, upon this remarkably useful characteristic of our environment.

Gravity keeps things on the ground.

It keeps the ground underneath the things.

And it keeps most of the things themselves where we left them.

Imagine trying to develop a culture of possessions in an environment where every object you put down immediately began drifting away. Storage would become considerably more complicated. Shelves would be of questionable value. A cupboard without some means of restraining its contents would be little more than an elaborate suggestion.

Even the idea of a room would begin to change.

Here on Earth, we can arrange our environment because our environment stays arranged. We don’t have to tether every chair to the floor, bolt every book to the shelf or tie our dinner plate to the table.

Gravity quietly does much of this work for us.

It doesn’t explain why humans became builders, collectors or possessors of things. Those are much more complicated questions.

But it provides the physical stage upon which all of this takes place.

Perhaps that’s one reason the chair seems so ordinary to us.

It belongs to a world in which objects can be placed, arranged and relied upon. A chair doesn’t simply support our weight; it occupies a particular place in an environment that remains relatively stable around us.

On a low-gravity world, perhaps the relationship between intelligence and material culture would be very different.

Perhaps not.

We don’t know.

But that is precisely the sort of question a chair can lead us toward, if we’re willing to keep looking.

What about a world with much stronger gravity than our own?

We have no direct evidence of complex life evolving under hundreds of times Earth’s gravity, so here again we are entering the realm of speculation. But we do know that life can survive under some remarkably hostile physical conditions.

Here on Earth, extremophiles live in environments that would kill us very quickly. Microorganisms survive intense heat, extreme cold, high acidity, high salinity and enormous pressures in the deepest parts of the oceans.

Life is surprisingly adaptable.

So perhaps somewhere, under some very different gravitational conditions, evolution has produced organisms that would make us look rather poorly designed. Or perhaps life simply can’t take hold under sufficiently extreme gravity.

We don’t know.

Gravity doesn’t tell evolution what to build. It doesn’t have a plan. It simply establishes some of the conditions under which life has to operate, and natural selection works within those conditions.

Here on Earth, those conditions eventually produced us.

And eventually, we got tired.

So we built a chair.

These are two extremes, however, and somewhere between them is the world we actually inhabit.

We don’t live in a world without gravity, nor do we live in one where gravity is so overwhelming that we can barely move.

We live here. And we’re remarkably well adapted to it.

Well, some of us are.

Mankind, even among the many thousands of species of life here on Earth, is a surprisingly fragile animal. We are frail and weak compared to many of our evolutionary counterparts, and we’re naturally ill-equipped to survive in many of the environments we continually inhabit.

Take away our clothing, shelter, tools and technology, and we’re in trouble remarkably quickly. Leave us naked in the Arctic, and we’ll die. Leave us naked in the desert, and we’ll die. Put us in the ocean, and we’ll probably die there too.

Give us a chair, however, and we’re doing considerably better.

There is something peculiar about this.

The natural world is full of creatures that are stronger than us, faster than us, better equipped to survive in their native environments and considerably less dependent upon furniture.

None of them builds chairs.

We do.

We don’t have claws, but we have knives. We don’t have fur, but we have clothing. We don’t have shells, but we have houses. We don’t have wings, but we have airplanes.

And apparently, we don’t want to stand up all day, so we have chairs.

Our great advantage is not physical strength. It is our ability to manipulate the environment around us.

We build things.

We alter things.

We take the materials we find in the world and turn them into things that didn’t previously exist. A tree becomes a house. Stone becomes a wall. Metal becomes a machine. Wood, fabric, springs and a little ingenuity become a place to park our butts.

This is one of the things that makes the chair so interesting.

It is not simply a naturally occurring object that we have learned to use. It is a deliberate arrangement of matter, designed to solve a particular problem.

We took the physical conditions imposed upon us by the universe, added a little biology, a little intelligence, a considerable amount of experimentation and perhaps a few arguments about aesthetics, and eventually produced furniture.

The chair is therefore both a product of nature and a product of our attempt to modify nature.

It is made from the same universe as everything else, governed by the same physical laws, but arranged according to human intention.

And there is the important word: Intention.

A tree doesn’t decide to become a chair.

A piece of iron doesn’t decide to become a chair.

The chair certainly doesn’t decide to become a chair.

We decide.

Somebody looked at the physical world, looked at the human body, considered the problem of gravity, and decided that it might be more comfortable if our backsides had somewhere to go.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple. But eventually, somebody sat down. And somebody else probably decided it could be made more comfortable.

Then somebody decided it needed arms. Then somebody decided it needed wheels. Then somebody decided it needed to recline. And eventually somebody put a cup holder on it.

Civilization marches forward.

The point is that the chair represents a curious intersection of natural law and human intention. Gravity provides the problem. Biology provides the body that has to deal with it. Physics provides the rules. And the human mind provides the idea.

That seems like a good place to start asking what exactly happens inside that mind. Because we’ve established that the chair exists. We’ve established that gravity makes it useful. We’ve established that human beings have the physical ability to sit in it. But none of that explains why you decided to sit down in the first place.

For that, we have to consider something considerably more complicated than gravity.

We have to consider ourselves.

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The experience may not be quite so profound for some of you. Well, likely for all of you. But it need not be the epitome of the mundane. It need not be the picture of laziness, or simply the end of the journey. Every act, every urge, every thought is driven by something. The motive may be obvious, or it may be masked behind personal experience, emotional history, cultural expectations and all the other complicated machinery that makes us who we are.

What makes the mind complicated also makes the chair complicated.

Dr. Sigmund Freud might suggest that before one can sit in the chair, one should first understand what the chair means to the subconscious and what the act of sitting does to the ego.

I’m willing to concede that the chair does not represent some latent desire to sexually consume our parents. We’ll leave that particular question to Freud.

What the chair means to us depends entirely upon our circumstances. It can be comforting, foreboding or completely meaningless. It can belong to someone else. It can be the chair your grandfather always sat in, and therefore mean something entirely different from an identical chair purchased yesterday at a furniture store.

We give meaning to the chair just as we give meaning to the choices we make in life. We justify, we reason, we ignore and we remember. We assign meaning where there may have been none, and sometimes remove meaning from things that once mattered enormously.

The same is true of the act of sitting.

I sit in the chair because I’m tired. The meaning of the act is found in my intention to rest.

I sit in the chair because it is appropriate to the social setting. The meaning is found in my intention to participate.

I sit in the chair because someone told me to. Now we’re getting into somewhat more complicated territory.

Perhaps I sit in the chair because everyone else is sitting, because I am uncomfortable standing, or because I’ve been sitting in the same chair for twenty years and my body has decided that this is simply where it belongs.

The physical act is essentially the same; the intention is not. And that distinction is important.

We can describe exactly how I sit down. I bend my knees, shift my centre of gravity, lower my body, adjust my posture and eventually come to rest upon the seat.

Biology and physics can tell us an extraordinary amount about how this happens, but they can’t, by themselves, tell us why.

‘Why’ is a different question.

What drives you? What moves you to sit in the chair, or reach for the stars? Is it necessity, desire, habit, social pressure, the influence of your parents, your friends, your culture, your experiences or some vague idea of what you think you are supposed to become?

The question of ‘why’ might be better left to Dr. Freud.

Or, actually, to you.

How, on the other hand, is the domain of biology. And biology is where things become strange again.

You are, essentially, a vast community of living cells. Your hand looks solid. Hopefully. Your feet belong to you. Your heart beats because you are alive. Your brain thinks your thoughts.

But beneath that reassuringly familiar surface is an enormous biological community, made up of cells working together, each performing specialized functions that allow the whole thing to continue operating.

Your body is not a single, simple machine. It is a cooperative arrangement. Millions upon millions of individual cells perform their various tasks, communicate with one another, reproduce, repair damage and eventually die.

Most of them have no idea that you are sitting in a chair. They don’t know what a chair is. They don’t know that you’re tired. They don’t know that you’ve spent the last several paragraphs thinking about the philosophical implications of furniture.

They are simply doing what they do.

And yet, collectively, they allow you to do all of those things. They allow you to see the chair, recognize it as a chair, decide that you would like to sit in it and formulate the intention to do so. They allow your muscles to respond, your bones and joints to shift into position, and eventually, they allow you to sit down.

The person sitting in the chair is therefore not quite as simple as it appears.

Neither is the chair.

The chair is an arrangement of matter shaped by human intention. You are an arrangement of living matter shaped by billions of years of evolution.

One was constructed deliberately. The other emerged through an immensely complicated natural process.

And somehow, the second arrangement of matter is capable of looking at the first and deciding to sit on it.

That is considerably more complicated than it sounds.

We started with a chair.

We’ve now arrived at consciousness, intention and the biological machinery that makes both possible.

All of this just to sit down.

We’re almost there.

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So, do we really need to consider all of these complicated processes and concepts just to sit in a chair?

Probably not.

We could have ended this essay several pages ago with a simple kinetic explanation: bend your knees, shift your weight, lower yourself onto the seat and try not to miss.

There.

You’ve sat in a chair.

But if you’ve followed me this far, you’ll have noticed that the process is considerably more complicated than that.

First, there has to be a chair. It has to exist in the physical universe, occupy space and possess enough structural integrity to support you.

There has to be gravity, or at least some equivalent force that allows you and the chair to exist in a stable relationship with the environment around you.

There has to be a human body capable of interacting with that environment, an extraordinarily complicated community of cells working together to produce movement, perception and thought.

And somewhere inside all of that machinery, there has to be intention.

You have to decide to sit.

Perhaps you’re tired. Perhaps you’re following social convention. Perhaps you’re avoiding something. Perhaps you’ve simply been sitting in the same chair for twenty years, and your body has decided that this is where it belongs.

Whatever the reason, the physical act remains essentially the same.

You sit down.

And yet, behind that simple act is an entire universe of conditions, history, biology, physics and intention.

That’s rather like life, isn’t it?

Isn’t it a simple thing to say that you want to be successful?

Isn’t it considerably more complicated to actually get there?

We often look at our own lives in much the same way we look at a chair. We see the finished object and forget about everything that went into making it.

We see where we are and imagine that where we are is simply where we ended up.

But there was a process.

There were choices, circumstances, accidents, intentions, failures, successes and countless things over which we had little or no control. There was the environment we inherited, the people who influenced us, the things we learned and the things we never learned.

None of this means that we can simply think our way into becoming whatever we want.

Intention isn’t magic. You can’t decide to fly and expect gravity to negotiate. You can’t wish a chair into existence.

And you can’t always will your life into becoming something it isn’t.

But intention matters.

It is the difference between merely existing within the circumstances of your life and recognizing that, wherever possible, you have some part to play in what happens next.

Perhaps that’s what I was trying to say when I began this ridiculous exercise.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of my life thinking about what I don’t want, while being considerably less certain about what I actually do want. That’s a strange way to navigate a life.

Maybe I should have spent more time considering the chair.

Not because the chair contains some profound secret, but because it is an excellent reminder that even the simplest things are rarely as simple as they appear.

We explored the universe. We considered gravity. We considered matter, biology, evolution, consciousness and intention. We examined the history and meaning of furniture. And for what?

To sit in a chair.

Fantastic. We did it. And all it took was an exploration of existence.

Perhaps that’s a little dramatic.

But the next time you find yourself staring at some problem that seems impossibly large, try reducing it to something you can actually do.

Don’t worry about the entire journey. Find the chair. Decide to sit. Bend your knees. Shift your weight. And sit down.

Sometimes, that’s all there is to it.

And sometimes, apparently, that’s enough to make you think about the universe.