LIVING THE Pi LIFE

I’ve mentioned before how terrible I am at the math and the science. I spent a good deal of my childhood in an insular place of books and television. A place where story drove actions, and evil was usually vanquished with a combination of luck, knowledge, and intuition. That’s why I struggled with the math and the science. I could never find the plot, context, or storyline. It never had a moral or counterpoint to ponder. It was just flat out dull and without a purpose. And all you Mathletes out there can yell and scream all you want about how math and science changed your understanding of the universe. Go ahead, this isn’t about you. But it will be if you stay tuned.
One day as I sat pondering the mangrove islands that sit about a mile or so from my office in the tropics, I realized how Pi could actually translate into my world. Finally, I was getting a handle on a puzzle that has been quietly stewing way back in the “things to eventually do” spaces of my mind. This one was buried behind an ongoing thought about how to define mayoral corruption, and just to the right of an ongoing debate about the best burger I ever ate.

According to Wikipedia Pi is referred to as an “irrational number”, a number whose “decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern”. Which makes it the perfect human number.

 Starting with the basic 3.1415 at birth we move on to calculating the next digit to the right, since there can be no other number to the left. And we spend the next umpteen years of our lives calculating one digit at a time. Each digit calculates as a defining point on the circle of your lifeline. Apparently Pi’s most common usage is to figure out circle volume, which fit with my thought on those moments when we actually figure out a point in the human life constant. By a certain age we like to think we have life figured out, and that we no longer really need to spend time pondering our place on the circle. Except I find as I age that my journeys and travels allow that I ponder more, not less.

The past ten years have seen me travel in ways I never traveled before, both personally and for work. I returned to places I have always loved to be. Those places of childhood and youthful experience that helped mold our family’s joint dynamic. I journeyed to new places where I found new outlooks, ideas, truths, and in no small measure personal growth. I found that some old concepts, formed in either anger or ignorance, needed a new look. It was challenging to question a lot of choices and decisions that in retrospect were holding me back rather than pushing me forward. And some that were needlessly destructive.

I chose to go back and examine each of those moments, and they had to be examined in different ways. First through circumstance, knowledge, and even prejudice, and then run through a filter of a particular emotion that dominated those moments. And those moments were not re-visited in linear fashion, because a life fully lived is never linear. Sometimes we have answers years before we know there is even a question, and sometimes we close doors far too securely without knowing we might want, or need to re-open them. And those moments are the Pi moments. When the calculation of the next digit falls into place, but we find several of the preceding calculations have been wrong, throwing off a sequence that follows.

After the cross country road trip I admitted to someone that I had never got lost, but I did turn some corners I hadn’t anticipated thus seeing places and ideas I hadn’t planned. That in itself was a Pi moment. Previous to that I had been lost many times, literally and figuratively. But I have travelled so many roads over the years that suddenly, on this road, an unfamiliar turn had the promise of new ideas and adventures.

 For the better part of a week I spent time on my tropical office chair watching the pelicans, the herons, the ibis’s, the Osprey. I was softly guided through a color palette of the sea trying to determine a shade of green from a shade of blue or even black. The jumping fish, the occasional fin of a shark, and the marshmallow theatrics of bleached cotton clouds in constantly evolving shades of a blue sky. All the while I was tracing the notion of Pi as a philosophical equation against my personal Songlines all helped through the lenses of iced tea, and when appropriate Sandbar Sunday, and Boodles.

 Calculating the number Pi is a process defined by a logical and somewhat linear progression despite being an “irrational number”. In life we as humans progress along the line we choose and follow in a seemingly orderly progression until from somewhere the irrational happens, and we stumble and fall out of sequence.

Some people are quite happy with their lives being rounded out to only 6 or 7 decimal places. I know people who are happy with that simplicity of a life that doesn’t progress much beyond last night’s sports scores or those game shows masquerading as “human reality”.

For me, I live for those Pi days when I find a new number for my sequence. I know I’ll have worked for it, and I’ll know its real value to me is that it’s not my last one.