Modest Pontification

The best moments are either the ones without words, or are the interactions between those who are held in personal esteem, with whom I enjoy the multitude of conversations. The worst moments are those filled with words that go in circles but never properly go down the drain and thereby jam up the flow of things. The most awkward moments are those wherein something needs to be said but there is too much on the line to act accordingly.

It has been a hell of a joyride here in Oxford and the greater U.K. in every sense of the word. I am suffering a slight pre-melancholy given the prospects of my departure. It can no longer be denied that I am almost, and will soon become history: a light breeze that whisked through Oxford for three months and then blew away to the other side of the globe. Is that what all life is – people coming and going, arriving and departing – all moving on to somewhere?

I have learned that there are many variables in life – all the variables are in play, sometimes in concert with one another, while at other times, colliding or racing away from each other. There are also constants, which can be affected by the variables in a host of different ways. There is an odd math in all human interactions and in many ways; it all boils down to something simple and elegant and many variables can be cancelled out, while you’re stuck with other ones. We all rush off to infinity, like an asymptote that hugs the zero but never – not even in infinity – touches its respective axis. Sometimes the rubic’s cube is a good analogy for the way we interact – change one thing, and four changes are automatically incurred based on that one choice.

Maybe physics points to our nature: Newton, roughly: “For every action, there is an opposite and equal action; objects in motion tend to stay in motion; objects at rest tend to stay at rest.” My mind struggles to understand whether we are linear beings, or whether we keep returning to the same point in space from various directions because that’s the nature of human beings. Words are great at trying to explain the pervasiveness of life, but insufficient in examining how much we are like one thing or another, without being a literal simile or metaphor. And, if history explains anything, it is simply that we do not learn from it.