feng shui and Heinrich Hertz

Feng shui is fascinating to me because it asks you to pay attention to something that can be difficult to explain: the feeling that things are in the right place. Feng shui comes from ancient Chinese tradition and is much broader than simply organizing furniture, but furniture is where I notice it most immediately. I can walk into a room and feel that a chair needs to move six inches, that a table is interrupting the space, or that an object belongs somewhere else entirely. Once everything is where it should be, the room feels different.

People sometimes describe that as energy flow, and that is where the whole thing starts to sound a little woo-woo. Energy? Flowing through the furniture? We are scientific people here. We believe in measurable things. We do not go around believing in invisible forces simply because someone says they can feel them. Except, of course, we do.

That brings me to Heinrich Hertz. Hertz was a German physicist who experimentally demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves in the late nineteenth century, confirming something James Clerk Maxwell had predicted mathematically. Hertz was dealing with something invisible. You could not simply look across the room and see an electromagnetic wave passing through it. He had to build experiments capable of detecting and measuring what human senses could not perceive directly. Eventually, the unit of frequency—the hertz—was named after him.

There is something extraordinary about taking an invisible phenomenon and developing a language precise enough that other people can recognize it too. Something previously imperceptible becomes measurable, communicable, and eventually ordinary. I am not saying that feng shui is electromagnetism. Heinrich Hertz did not scientifically prove that my sofa is in the wrong place. But I am interested in the resemblance between the experiences. Both begin with the possibility that something affecting us may not be immediately visible.

Designers understand this instinctively. Give two people the same room and the same objects and they may arrange them completely differently. One person places something in a corner and it feels exactly right. Another puts it somewhere else and somehow the entire room seems wrong. The same thing happens in graphic design, choreography, writing, fashion, architecture, painting—probably every art form. Some people seem to possess a strange internal sense of placement. They know where something belongs before they can necessarily explain why.

We often call that intuition, or gut instinct. The phrase itself interests me because intuition can genuinely feel physical. You do not always experience it as a sentence forming inside your brain. Sometimes your body seems to register something before your conscious mind catches up. Recently, I've been hearing there's is a large nervous system in the digestive tract—the enteric nervous system—and researchers continue to study the complicated communication between the gut and brain. Maybe intution does come from the gut?

Maybe years of looking, reading, listening, arranging, moving, and making slowly create an internal detector. Gut senses. You walk into a room, you move the chair, and nothing measurable has announced itself, but something goes: there. I wonder what Heinrich would say? Would he tell you to trust the invisible feeling? Does being invisible mean something isn’t there? Not necessarily.