Seen while sitting outside with my dog -
I hear a slow and methodical click click sound coming up behind me. This is a neighborhood with A LOT more elderly people than my previous neighborhood. So I know it is an old person walking with a cane. The older man walks up to where I’m sitting and I notice that he has a special kind of walking stick, with one held in each hand, like ski poles. He’s wearing a faded, rumply black windbreaker, and loose beige pants. He’s walking very slowly, with very small identical increments of steps and walking stick movements. I feel an automatic feeling of … uncomfortableness, at his current physical situation. Thinking it’s sad that he needs to walk so slowly, but also it’s good that he can get out in this nice Spring weather… but also feeling sad about old age. An Asian woman is walking up behind him with a brisk and energetic tread, but not with a mood of being in a rush. She is dressed oddly. An old-fashioned long brown dress with criss-crossing thin lines, a face mask, and clunky, unstylish running sneakers. As she walks by him, she slows down, and looks over. She says something to him, and in that moment, suddenly it seems like they are *together*. I know they are separate individuals who are out separately and don’t know each other, but when she is next to him talking to him, there’s a feeling like they live together and have come out for a walk together, and she is there to help him. I don’t think he said anything back, but then she reached behind him. She tugged on the back of his rumply black windbreaker, and that’s when I noticed that it looks rumply because the bottom half is stuck under the strap of a small cross-body bag he’s wearing. She straightens it out, and then moves on, and quickly moves off into the distance, crossing the street and out of sight. As I sat there thinking about this, for maybe the next 5 minutes, the old man still has yet to reach that street, though he eventually does, crosses, and goes towards a bus stop.
I went outside today feeling better than yesterday and the day before, when I had encountered that rude, troll-like guy on our dog walk. I could sense it right from the get go… when I encountered the worker sweeping the hall with one of those very wide brooms. When I got outside, noticing a variety of tiny insects flying at the grass level. Noticing how it’s that time of Spring when the pink petals pile up in corners like soft confetti. Coming back, seeing the Amazon delivery guy stuck outside the door and waiting to be buzzed in. It made me realize that this is my current problem with trolls - they make me feel like I am being personally targeted, and I get stuck in an anger bubble where I hyperfocus on that person and me. When I get out of that, it’s like the mentality expands and opens, and I’m more aware of the diversity of things around me.
This morning, my partner had been describing how he solved a polynomial equation. He started to explain about the odd thing with the number line and rational and irrational numbers. You could have a very limited number line, going from zero to five, but within that limited range, there are an infinite number of fractions and irrational numbers (like pi). Then, if you try to graph the number line as a function, with ‘1’ assigned to rational numbers, and ‘0’ assigned to irrational numbers, you can’t because there’s an infinite number of each.
This made me think that maybe the math is like a parallel to the materials of life. The matter in the universe is always moving and changing into other forms. That is also a kind of infinity, in terms of the movement and changing, constantly.
Then he started to explain how irrational numbers like pi that go on infinitely, are not really useful, because there is no perfect circle. If you need to solve something relating to a circle, you don’t really need to use pi, but a close approximate rational number (3.14).
This made me think that there might really be something to the advice people give, about how perfection is not important and not the point. There are no perfect circles in the universe, maybe again, because of that constant changing and motion that is happening all the time. So that means that a ‘perfect’ irrational number like pi, that goes on infinitely, is static and unchanging. That’s why it’s not useful for anything in life, because things in life are not like that.
