The Emergent Narrative: Life Through the Prism of Bambi and Mathematics

In the realm of classic storytelling, few tales resonate with the innocence of growth and the stark reality of loss as vividly as Walt Disney's 1942 masterpiece, Bambi. The animated journey of a young buck, Bambi, encompasses the full spectrum of life's theater — from the tender moments with his mother after his birth to the transformative challenges that crown him as the Great Prince of the Forest.

This poignant narrative, while seemingly simple, is woven with profound emotional threads. It traces Bambi's life through three foundational attributes:

• Years of life: the temporal sequence of Bambi's life as a deer
• Use Case: Bambi's journey to becoming Prince, and
• Domain: the forest that is both Bambi's cradle and crucible.

Yet, such an elemental distillation — reducing a rich tapestry to a triad of life, use case, and domain — doesn't diminish the story's intricacies. Instead, it encapsulates the essence of reality within the confines of a virtually-cubed abstraction.

Walt Disney's genius lay in the realization that our lives mirror Bambi's in their cubist structure. We are all protagonists in our narratives, journeying through the forests of our existence, not in pursuit of princely titles, but in search of our destinies within our unique cubes of lived experience.

My story feels not like a reflection of Bambi's but rather a retelling. One which began playing on the silver screen of my life some 52-odd years later. Like Bambi, I was attached to a parental figure, my father. Our bond, akin to the one Bambi shared with his mother, was severed prematurely — a loss that came not in the harshness of my first winter but in the budding promise of my fourteenth spring. This tragic event, much like the hunter’s bullet in Bambi's tale, fractured the most familiar and sacred structure of my world.

As Bambi was impelled by his mother's last words to dash into the forest, my life took a parallel turn without so much as a parting whisper The absence of my father's last words left me with only my intuition, a silent echo urging me to 'Run, Meast, Run.' And so, I ventured into life's thicket to confront the essential facts of my reality and discover what they might have to teach me — not merely an analogue to Thoreau but as the personification of Bambi.

My narrative is a work in progress, and unlike the closure granted to Bambi, my story remains open-ended, the conclusion not yet in sight. This uncertain prospect has not deterred me from animating my lived experiences — much like Disney breathed life into Bambi's story through art, I use mathematics to give form to mine with equivalently discrete and three-dimensional abstraction.

The animation I've created is not merely for entertainment; it is an exploration of essential truth, where each frame is a step in a direction chosen not by the bounds of the cube, but by the artist — in this case, the vector of my life.

If my journey seems to be cast in the same heroic light as Disney's animated prince, it is because I believe in the narrative power of self - not myself but the self. And while Walt may have held the pencil to Bambi's life, it is Bambi's story which teaches us each that we hold the pencil — or the vector — to our own lives, forever charting the course of our stories within the discretely contained yet truly unlimited dimensions we inhabit.

If I seem self-aggrandizing, it's because I am, and you can blame Walt Disney.

To bring this story to its own closure. I'll leave you my imagined view of Walt Disney's method of abstraction - Life, Use-Case, and Domain - told through the medium of my abstract educational and professional narrative.

• y-axis, Life: My age in Life.
• x-axis, Use-Case: A stratification of use-cases across education and career (e.g., consulting practices / functional areas). Expressed as category code coordinates, and listed in order of first appearance.
• z-axis, Domain: A stratification of educational and professional settings I've traversed through life thus far (e.g., K12, client industries ). Expressed as category code coordinates, and listed in the order of first appearance.

• Path (Red Boxes): Reflect discrete coordinates of age, use-case, and domain which have been "traveled." (i.e., my educational/professional path so far).
• Color Scale: Where I had data from contemporaneous time keeping, I embedded the sum of logged hours for each Path coordinate.

These three axes come together as the drawing table of my abstract narrative. One which you can shine a light through and project my narrative. Put it all together and with some bare bones data and you have the a structural animation of my narrative of 29 years expressed in 73 frames of a red dots and their movement through a matrix of domain and use-case the two balanced by a higher-order draw towards life. Each frame is a projected step in my non-linear Disney-inspired narrative journey).

When I watch this animation, crude as it is, I see a narrative of education as as a platform. One which rose to a staircase. One which led me to study business and make it my profession. I started in a consulting use case, and it was an opportunity to build a platform of domain knowledge. This later gave me the courage to try new things in familiar places. Next to my platform I see, over time, an accumulation of internal projects and learning & development. This animation tells me that growth has always been my home, and expanding my use-case and domain knowledge has been my path of exploration. The rest of my narrative remains un-rendered.

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In loving memory of my dad. You always saw me for what I was, not what you needed me to be, and that's because you always wanted me to be all that I could be — myself.