Bloom where you are planted

 Bloom where you are planted

By Bobby Neal Winters

Age has, to a certain degree, brought me peace.

I used to worry about politics.  I used to follow my political party’s candidates like my friends who like sports follow the members of their favorite team.

I’m done with that now.

Maybe because I am tired now: Tired of being angry; tired of being lied to.  Maybe it’s because I’ve grown cynical:  cynical about the politicians on both the left and right.

It certainly can be because I’ve grown any wiser.  I don’t remember that ever happening.

But I am at peace, and, believe it or not, I am happy.

I admire the people who can survey the horizon and see a beautiful destination on it.  Then, having seen that destination, they go ahead to plot a course to that destination. Then, having plotted that course, they go ahead and do what needs to be done, come hook or crook, come hell or high water, to make their way to that destination.  Yes, while I admire them, I cannot say that I number myself among them.

I’m of a different sort now.

Whatever my initial ambitions, I came to a point in my life where I decided to be happy.

It was a decision.

I will grant that I’ve been lucky in the most important aspects of my life, the first among these being my choice of a spouse. I’ve been lucky to have received an education without amassing debt; I’ve been lucky to have lived the bulk of my life during a time of peace and security. I’ve been lucky to have good health, both physically and mentally.

This all granted, I know of people who have all of those things and perhaps more, but are not happy.

I’ve decided to be happy.  It has been my decision.

I can’t put a date on it.  At some point, I looked around me, and said: This is where I am; this is where I live; this is my life; I am going to live it.

In the 29th Chapter of Jeremiah, the prophet conveyed God’s message to his people: “Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”

This is what life is going to be.  This is as good as it gets.  There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. Get on with your life and start living it.

As I said, I’ve been blessed in all the basic areas of my life, so this has been easy for me. Jeremiah, however, was talking to political refugees:  People who’d been uprooted from their homes and moved forcibly to the land of their captor. The message from God that he had was for those people to embrace their new reality.  You are living here, so build yourselves a rich life here.

The decision to be happy can look a lot like the decision to bloom where you are planted.

There are small things you can do to help with this. One simple thing is to learn people’s names; let them know yours; be friendly; be kind.  After a while, they will smile when they see you come through the door.

That makes me happy.

Now I am not going to lie to you.  There are plenty of things to worry about in politics.  Each party curses the other party as being the worst sort of liar, crook, and hypocrite there is.  Having listened to both sides for many years now, I think they are both right.

It could be that we are going to live through a rough time.  I don’t know.  But if we do, it’s something that people have done before.

But as I’ve said.  This has come to me with age. Younger people are harder to convince.  God be with them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Getting Philosophical

 Getting Philosophical

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been getting more philosophical in my old age.  People mean a variety of things when they say that.  Some mean they are getting more stoical, i.e. more willing to take what comes as it is and to endure it.  That may be true of me as well--I’ll think about that--but it’s not what I mean when I say philosophical.

What I mean is that I tend to think more about the true nature of reality.  This, and because I am a mathematician, means that I find myself spending more time thinking about what numbers are and the nature of their existence.

One can ask, do numbers exist?

The quick answer is of course they do.  You could ask a random person on the street this.  They would say sure.  If you asked them to show you three and they had been out buying fruit, they could show you three apples.

The response to this would be, “You haven’t shown me three; you’ve shown me some apples.” You could then take three of their oranges and say, “You’ve shown me three apples.  Here are three oranges.  They are manifestations of “three,” but they are not “three.”  “Three” is an idea.”

If the person you’d stopped on the street were a construction worker, you might find yourself with six pieces of fruit rammed up your backside. (Not the number six itself, which is also an idea, but the actual, physical fruit.)

The fact that numbers are ideas only gets more interesting when we push past whole numbers.

Because of the way we learn math, we’ve been conditioned to think of numbers as decimals.  Numbers are not decimals.  As has been said, numbers are ideas; numbers are words; but numbers are not decimals.  Decimals are ways in which we attempt to write numbers.

The decimal system of writing numbers is a means of doing so which is very convenient when we need to do arithmetic.  We can use them in hand-written work, sure, but they are very handy to just tap into a calculator.  I think that this has contributed to the belief that numbers are decimals.

Here’s the thing: Not every number can be represented exactly as a decimal.  The original example of this was the square root of two.  This was discovered by Pythagoras. He didn’t put it that way because decimals had not been invented yet.  More accurately, we would say that he discovered that the square root of two couldn’t be expressed as a fraction.  This isn’t exactly true either, but I am too far off in the weeds already.

It is not difficult to show this is true, but that isn’t my point today.  Let’s push on.

We refer to numbers like the square root of two as irrational numbers.

There are a lot of other irrational numbers, but the one that most people are the most familiar with is Pi.  Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  Its decimal representation begins as 3.14159... and just goes on forever without going into a cyclic representation like 1/3 as 0.333... or 1/9 as 0.111111... .

Pi is also an example of a transcendental number, but let’s put a pin in that.  We might come back to it if I get people asking for it, but it being irrational is enough for today.

While I could sit down with you at a table at Signet Coffee Roasters with a napkin and a pen and--for the price of a chocolate chip cookie--show you that the square root of two is irrational, to show you pi is irrational is more work.

It can be done, but you have to bring a little more along with you.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a student on irrational numbers and transcendental numbers.  As a part of this, I’ve been doing some research on them and have found a nice proof that pi is irrational.

This proof is due to a man called Ivan Niven.  Niven was a Canadian-American number theorist.  His proof that pi is irrational is delightfully simple in the fact that it uses no mathematics beyond Calculus II, which is a Freshman course for math majors.

It is a beautiful proof. In its structure and because it uses such simple tools.  In its original form, it fits easily on one page of a journal with some white space to spare. The version I worked with was a little longer than that, but not much.

The notes I’ve made from it to use to explain it to my student go six pages from a yellow pad.  I don’t know what that will type up to, but it’s still not too bad.

To understand this by analogy, it’s like someone has made a chest of drawers with a hand saw, a plane, and a chisel.  All of the joins are perfect.  You can use a hand saw; you can use a plane; you can use a chisel.  Making that perfect chest of drawers is a different thing, though.

As a part of the proof, Niven uses a particular polynomial in a particular way.  At the same time I was thinking of the question on my own, the author reproducing the proof asks, “Where did Niven get that polynomial from?” I was thinking the same thing myself.

It made me feel good to know I wasn’t the only one with the question. But it’s also good to know there are minds sharper than mine.

It makes me philosophical in another way.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

And then there were...

And then there were...

By Bobby Neal Winters

My birthday is coming up.  It’s not a special one.

By that I mean it is not a special number like 50, 60, 65, or 70;  not a round number; not a prime number; not a number associated with anything legal.  I will tell you this: It is evenly divisible by 9 and by 7, but it’s less than 100.  

You can figure it out from that.

One of the things that happens to you as you grow older is that people around you start disappearing. It’s like being in one of those old murder mysteries. 

As I’ve written a number of times before, I grew up in a church that taught “the Rapture” as doctrine.  The trump would sound and people would disappear. You’d be left alone to live through the Great Tribulation. 

I found the notion to be absolutely terrifying.  Anytime I found myself alone, I wondered if everyone else had been raptured.

The Rapture in that form has not occurred--at least yet--but people are disappearing from around me, and the Tribulation is here.

Back to my point, what causes this thing I am noticing? We typically hang around with people who are close to our own age.  I remember when I was younger when I looked at people older than myself, it was like I was looking up from the base a pyramid or a skyscraper:  There were a lot of people above me.

Yes, there were a lot of people above me, but I didn’t pay them much attention because we lacked the common shared experience which is the basis for meaningful communication.  

Because of this after a certain age, some of your best friends are your former enemies, but I am digressing again.

Young people--as I was then--tend to be focused on the new.  Older people, as I found out when I became one, have been through all that.  We’ve done the new; then the new became old. We took up the new again. 

The circle goes round and round.

Now I look below me and there is a crowd.  I look above me and see that the pyramid is a lot thinner and I am a lot closer to the apex.

That’s the way it has seemed lately. It has been a year of loss.

I’ve lost schoolmates in Oklahoma.  People my age and younger. I’ve not looked at Oklahoma’s demographics.  I don’t know that the life expectancy there is less than here.  However, I am losing old schoolmates at an appalling rate.  People put on mileage faster in the oil-patch, I suppose.

But death is not a respecter of persons.  About a year ago, I lost a friend of my age who was a consummate professional in every sense of the word. The Fates simply spun his thread, measured it, and cut it.  

He was gone. It was a shock even though he’d been ill.

But most of the friends we lose aren’t from the inner circle because the inner circle by its very nature is small.  There is a phenomenon that happens; let’s call it a melting of our world.  

We go to church; we go to our service clubs.  There are people who--at first--will be missing from time to time.  Then they will only show up every once in a while.  Then they will be gone more often than not.

Then they are just gone.

You will hear someone ask, “Did you hear what happened to...?”

“No what?”

“Well...”

“Oh no!”

One less friend; one less acquaintance. 

In another sense, it’s like we are all standing on a great plain, but it is bounded by a cliff.  The ground keeps giving way, falling into the abyss below and taking people with it all the time, but we don’t notice what is happening until it gets close to us.  We can see the people between us and the edge.  Some are trying to move toward safer ground.  Some are facing it stoically. 

Some are clueless, taken by surprise.  Maybe they are the lucky ones.

Maybe not.  I don’t know.

I lost a man I knew from church this past week.  His wife had passed not long ago.  Suddenly. He’d run an errand.  When he left, she was fine. When he returned she was gone. He was never the same.  Now he has joined her.

I am close enough now to the top of that pyramid to know the stories, to cherish the stories.

The earth under my feet is still solid as far as I know, but the birthdays keep piling up.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Mask and the Heart

 The Mask and the Heart

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there have been a lot of emotionally laden situations.  In particular, I’ve been impressed with how in control of her emotions his widow, Erika, has been.  She is a very composed, very impressive individual. I am not the first to notice this, but it can’t be said often enough. 

In the wake of this, I’ve been thinking about King David a lot. And I do mean a lot.  Not only a lot for most people but a lot for me.  We’ve been surrounded by violence and death.  But because of the stories the Bible gives us, we know our situation is not new.

David was also surrounded by death, indeed, by a lot more death than we are. He fought battles, but more personally, he lost children--which would have to be the worst of all--on several occasions.  I want to talk about two of these.

Before we get into the specifics, let me say that David was a man who--at least at an unconscious level--understood how to create a particular sort of persona, how to project a certain image: David the Poet Warrior.  And he was a Poet Warrior, don’t get me wrong, but we need to know there is a difference between being a Poet Warrior and projecting that image. It is possible to do one without doing the other. He did both.

In addition, he was also a human being.

The lost children I want to talk about are the child that was born of adultery between David and the wife of Uriah the Hittite and of David’s son Absalom. 

The first of these deaths happened when the child, a boy whose name is not given, was a baby.  According to scripture, the child was stricken because David had stolen Uriah’s wife (whose name isn’t given either, but we know it was Bathsheba) and killed Uriah.  

While the child was ill, David openly fasted and wept for the child.  His actions were extreme enough that when the child died, David’s servants were reluctant to tell him because they were fearful of what he would do.

As David was very tuned-in to his household, by their very quietness, he was able to tell that the child had died.  When he elicited that information from them, ”[he] arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.”

When asked why he fasted and wept when the child was ill, but not when the child died, he replied, “I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again?”

It can be roughly summarized that he was putting on a show of grief, in hopes of a different outcome. He’d affected the persona of grief.

The second death I want to talk about happened to his son Absalam. 

Absalam was not a baby. Far from it.

Absalam was in the process of leading a revolt against King David, he was riding along by himself on a mule and got his long hair caught in the limbs of a tree.  While he was stuck there, some of David’s soldiers, acting against David’s orders, killed Absalam with spears.

Upon learning of this, David’s response was much different than before. He cried out: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Such was the strength of his emotion that Joab, his main general, had to caution him for fear of demoralizing the army. (For the sake of brevity, I am leaving a lot of backstory and nuance out of this. Read the book.)

I pick these two incidents to see the change that occurred to David over the course of the passage of time.

In the first of these, David put forth the face of mourning with an attempt to sway God Himself, who can see into every human heart, even that of a king.

In the second, David’s love for his son was so strong that in spite of the fact his son was in open, violent revolt against him, his grief upon his death overcame any ability to put forth the image required of a king.

Our leaders, the ones we like as well as the ones we don’t like, bear a burden: Very rarely can they be themselves. More precisely, they have to be very careful in the parts of themselves they reveal to the public. They wear a public mask.

But God sees the heart and will heal the pain.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.