The Chemistry Of Life

 It's already one and a quarter years since Senior High School life hit me. Although my overall experience is good, there is some struggle I have to conquer. One of them is the Chemistry class, a lesson that can be difficult to understand, but it's still interesting. It studies the components of matter and how they interact in a reaction.

One of my favorite lessons in that class is something called stoichiometry. It's basically how you can balance a reaction so that the number of atoms in the reactants (the left-hand side) is the same as the number of atoms in the products (the right-hand side). For example, take a look at this propane combustion reaction:

C3H8 (g) + O2 (g) -> CO2 (g) + H2O (g)

This reaction is unbalanced. There are 3 carbon atoms on the left-hand side and only 1 on the right-hand side. The same happens to hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

Now look at this reaction:

C3H8 (g) + 5 O2 (g) -> 3 CO2 (g) + 4 H2O (g)

Now everything is balanced. There are 3 carbon atoms on the left-hand side and also 3 on the right-hand side. The same happens to hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

That's it. Chemistry is the art of balancing. Everything in the universe should be balanced so that no anomaly will occur. You could just take some protons off a plutonium's nucleus and ended up destroying a whole city with a nuclear explosion. Without balance, something can be wrong on one side and can affect the other side.

The same thing happens in our life. It's a cliché thing to hear that life is about dualism. About Yin and Yang. Yeah, there are two sides in our life, and both of them should be balanced. If there's something not balanced on one side, it can screw up our life. For instance, we should balance work and play. If we play more, we will become lazy and unproductive. If we work more, we will become stressed and that also leads to unproductivity. To prevent that, we should reduce a little bit from the surplus and add something to the deficit side

Chemistry taught us the importance of balance and how to maintain it, including balance in life. The more balanced our life, the easier us to achieve our goals. That's for this article, thank you.