How Newton’s Third Law helped me spot the space between frustration and choice
You remember Newton’s Third Law, right?
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Classroom posters. The little desk toys (I have one) with the silver balls clacking back and forth. Action, reaction, repeat. Endlessly. Newton’s Cradle – I used to love that, which is why Lauren bought me one. Give one ball a swing, and the others jump to life. No thinking, no pause – just an instant transfer of force.
And for years, I lived like that. That cradle was my brain.
Something went wrong – I reacted. The washing machine broke mid-cycle? Grumble, stomp, mutter. Someone cut me up in traffic? Hand gestures, fruity language, and that familiar flush of rage behind the eyes. A queue moving at glacial pace? Heart rate up, jaw tight, patience in tatters.
Every action met with an equal and opposite reaction. Just like Newton said. Only I did it with a lot more swearing.
But here’s the bit I started to question:
What if we don’t have to react?
What if we could pause the clack of the cradle, just for a second?
Because Newton wasn’t talking about people. He was talking about objects. Mass and motion and forces. He was bang on for billiard balls and pendulums – but we’re not balls, or pendulums. We’re not required to react immediately and match the intensity. We’ve got something better than mechanics: we’ve got a choice.
And once that idea landed – properly landed – it changed everything.
It came in slowly at first. A conversation here, a bit of Stoic reading there, then one day something clicked:
There’s a gap.
Between something happening and me reacting to it, there is a flicker of space. A blink. A breath. Not much – barely noticeable at first – but it’s there. And in that moment, something magical happens:
You get to decide.
It doesn’t sound like much. But trust me, when you’ve spent decades reacting out of habit – out of adrenaline, out of sheer bloody reflex – that realisation feels like someone’s handed you the keys to a quieter life.
That’s when I named it:
The Action–Reaction Void.
The Void is that small space between what happens and what you do about it. And the more you practise noticing it, the bigger it gets. It goes from blink to breath. From breath to full pause. From a pause to a space. Sometimes even a day or two, if you’re really on a roll. It stops being a flicker and becomes a proper moment – a wedge you can slide into and sit in for a while before you decide what comes next. Pull up a chair if you like.
And when you’re in it, everything slows down.
You’re still you. You still feel things. But you don’t have to act on the first impulse. You don’t have to respond to a shitty email with a shittier one. You don’t have to raise your voice when someone winds you up. You can choose silence. You can choose stillness. You can choose not to get dragged into the clack-clack-clack of endless back-and-forth energy.
Don’t get me wrong – this wasn’t some overnight transformation. I didn’t suddenly become Zen Carl with perfect patience and an inner peace that smells of sandalwood. I still get it wrong. The jaw still clenches. The words still mutter. But I notice them now. And most of the time, I pause. And sometimes, that pause is enough to stop a molehill turning into a mountain. I control the outcome.
That’s the real shift: not perfection, but awareness.
Because once you know the Void is there, you can start using it. And it’s like stretching a muscle – bit by bit, over time, it grows. You expand the space. You take up more room in your own reaction. You reclaim the moment before it runs away with you.
And here’s the good bit: the other person (if the Action is human) doesn’t even have to know. The world carries on, but you’ve changed how you’re meeting it. Not with force. Not with instant Reaction. With choice.
That’s where Newton got it half-right. Yes, there’s action. And yes, there’ll eventually be a reaction. But we get to decide what that reaction looks like. It doesn’t have to be equal. It doesn’t have to be opposite. It doesn’t have to be immediate.
It can be calm. Considered. Patient. Powered down.
And for me, that’s where this all began. Not with a crisis. Not with a finding myself trip to the mountains or a 10-day silent retreat. Just with Newton’s Law, a bit of life experience, and the simple thought: maybe I don’t have to react like I always have.
Maybe, I can choose something else.
And in that maybe, The Void began.