That's Thinking Positive

I am fascinated by numbers.

They are one of the very few things completely out of the hands of humans. We have zero impact on them. They exist beyond human interaction such that we can utilize them without making the smallest iota of change in them.

In grade school, teachers will sometimes try to get children to grasp the concept of infinity. Of course, no human mind can actually grasp infinity, but she wants to give the children the concept to play around with at an early age. It's usually in asking what the biggest number is and watching as the children spout off the highest number they can think of only to find that adding one to it outshines their response.

A bit later, probably in middle school, students realize that infinity is not a situation of counting up from zero - but that infinity has no beginning or end. The spectrum stretches below the zero line on down to the infinitum. In fact, zero is an arbitrary starting point, as infinity has no beginning, end, or middle.

That is about all that most people can handle about infinity. It is an impossible thing to get beyond, and I could spend 30 pages of email going over all the fun trivia about infinity, but I wont.

I'll only use this one example that almost no one thinks about. We're trained to think of infinity as "starting" at zero and going upwards....1,100,1000,10000

,etc....forever. Or downward in the opposite direction....forever. It's like a train, going from station to station...1 to 2 to 3 to 4.

However, in addition to the infinity that exists through the numbers, there is also an infinite amount of number between 1 and 2. We just tend not to think of numbers that way.

Not only do numbers raise into the gazllions and googleplexes, they also hide between the smallest of number found on the telephone dial, creating infinity space between 1 and 2.

All this to say, isn't that sometimes how relationships work? How are we, as simple beings incapable of grasping this concept, supposed to connect with each other when there is an infinite space between 1 and 2? Between one person and another. Sometimes it seems that we mimic numbers, that we are in capable of reaching each other because no matter how close we get, there is something else standing in the way. The higher we count, we get outshined by adding just one more number as far away from the decimal as it can go - and then it can go further.

How do we let our relationships get like that? I think we've all had one or many where things just seemed distant beyond hope. Maybe it didn't matter and maybe it meant the world. How are we supposed to fix something like that?

Numbers. It's nice to have something completely beyond our control.