Turn down the math and turn up the myth; and why maybe it’s time to stop making sense.

Hi Folks, Happy Wednesday and 3rd day of Summer.

I have been thinking a lot about perspective, it's easy to get stuck in perspectives and it can be hard to see things in a different way than we have been taught, especially if we are logically minded. The irony is sometimes it's our rational mind that gets us the most stuck, sometimes we need to stop reading things as syllogisms and start reading them as lyrics.

Anyways here is this weeks dose of my attempt at unravelling these thoughts. I would love to hear what you think, like, agree or disagree with.

I deeply appreciate your reading and any feedback you might have!

Ben

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Sometimes 1+1 does not equal 2.

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Do you remember those math questions where you were given a pattern of numbers and you supposed to finish the sequence? ?Well life isn’t really like that.

In many areas progress is not linear. We like to think about things in sequences and patterns and we like to think we can predict what will happen next based on what has happened before.

The trouble is this doesn’t work very well when the sequence doesn’t make very much sense, when there doesn’t seem to be a pattern when the growth or progress is not linear. When this happens, we get discouraged we often don’t want to keep going because the next part of the path seems to be going “down” or “back” and we don’t understand how the pattern plays out because we have been conditioned to see things a certain way, or to interpret things in a data analysis sort of lens. We always want to understand the sequence, we want to solve life's problems with a mathematical theory.

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We love to talk about the “big picture” but I don’t think we really understand what that means. Yes, it is good to be able to make sense of things in our own lives and often with time and with work this can be achieved, but there are many times along the trajectory of our lives that we cannot possibly imagine what type of "bigger picture" we are part of, or even conceive of any bigger picture that could possibly be any good given the many awful things that happen in our world and also in our own lives. There is no room for this loss, or this pain or this hurt in a plan that is good we tell ourselves, if this is the bigger plan then I want out. In the Return of the king Sam and Frodo feel desolate, alone and exhausted on their way to Mount Doom, Sam speculates about the great heroes and stories that he had read where things got so bad that you didn’t even want to imagine an ending to the story, because how could there be a good ending to such a story? How could something so bad, so awful, so disparaging so painful ever turn into something good? We have these conversations with ourselves more times than we realize, I think.

There is a lot to handle in this life and tragedy, trauma and pain might be very much the norm for many of us on the day to day. How does one look forward with hope while in the midst of such things? How do we see around the corner? How can we stay on a path that looks to lead only to immanent suffering? The answer lies in understanding the truth about our perception and understanding the truth about the nature of our “path”.

Simply put we have a distorted view of how things work, we conceive of life as an input output function where one type of input means one type of output, we think about life in a very linear and one-dimensional model which does not allow for us to see how things actually work. It is helpful for us to apply almost mathematical like symmetry and function to our worldview because this how we are trained to think, and it does work in many areas, but it also falls drastically short if it is used as our “big picture” lens. The truth is life is very nonlinear, and the same inputs do not always equal the same outputs. Sometimes three negatives will equal a positive, sometimes a long downward trend changes into an exponential upward trend, sometimes our greatest suffering becomes our greatest asset. We tend to not be able to understand this until we experience it. It doesn’t really make “sense” in the logical way of things but then neither to any of the greatest things we experience in this life such as falling in love, getting married, or having kids, these are not quantifiable realities and if we treat them as such, we lose something.

Chesterton writes that, “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players?do. Mathematicians?go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I?am not, as?will?be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger?does?lie in logic,?not?in imagination.”

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You see we do not live in a world only of addition and subtraction, yes logic is crucial and yes it helps us to think about things rationally, but it leaves out some of the context, some of the experience and as a result we become frustrated and discouraged by our predictions or evaluations of our experience and where it seems to be leading. We cannot understand that in the end “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” (Isa 11:6) And we need to know that this isn’t just some distant nice sounding Bible verse, this is a reality that plays out in our world much more often than we let ourselves believe but we do have to look for it and if we do, we might see that, “The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps the greater.” (Haldir, The Fellowship of the Ring)

So how does this affect us on the day to day? You might look around and think, well I don’t see any lambs walking with lions and in my world one plus one does equal two! So enough of the poetic BS! That is a rational response, and you cannot be blamed for having it. But if we do what we always have done then we will get what we have always gotten. Maybe it’s time to give the poetry a chance, maybe it’s time to see yourself in an epic poem where you can’t explain everything with math, and if you did, the poem wouldn’t be much good, maybe it’s time to try a different lens, we don’t listen to music because it is good logic, we listen to it because it takes us somewhere that logic cannot. Maybe it’s not the poetry that’s frustrating you, maybe it’s the math, maybe it’s too much math. Maybe it’s time to see things less as an operation of “ones” and “zeroes” and more as a pallet of colors, maybe the darkness of your story is what will make it so rich.

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Don’t be afraid of your imagination, don’t stop just with what makes “sense” in the conventional way of life, because pretty soon that won’t make any sense at all. We love to look at “the studies” and hear what the “experts” have to say but at a certain point that just isn’t helpful, sometimes you look out in front of you and know that what you’re seeing is not what your hearing, not what you're being told.

Here is one practical exercise you can do to put this into practice in your own life. What stories do you like? What movies, what books? Who do you relate to in those stories? Why? We relate to things because they speak to our heart, we see ourselves in stories because they can reveal us to ourselves, they can shed light on what is going on and point to what is coming. Maybe your character is stricken with grief, maybe he is imprisoned, maybe he has done terrible things, but what happens next? There is likely a difficult road to travel but where is it going? What does it make of him? You might be encouraged by what you find.

So don’t get stuck in your mathematical predictions, because those answers might get you the marks but what is the point of marks if you’re missing the only mark that really matters, your real life, your purpose and your great story. What if the lions started to lay down with lambs in your own life? What if the things that didn’t make sense ended up being the best part of your story? What if this was the only way you could get to the good ending? What if your greatest cross was the doorway to your joy. Stop making sense and start getting into the story.

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Your companion on the nonlinear path,

Ben