Truth in Numbers

I have another post sitting in draft mode on the concept of satya in yoga–truthfulness, or rather not lying. But I'm struggling with it the way I think we often struggle with truth. How much is too much? How much is necessary? How much is kind? Does the truth I need to tell match the truth you're ready to hear from me? And what is truth anyway? That post will sit a little longer while I puzzle it out.

But thinking about truth got me thinking about reality, and thinking about reality always makes me think of number lines. I exchanged rings with my life partner, finally, after our 15th year, and on the inside of mine I have engraved a number line. People who have looked carefully at it always ask what the numbers are for–maybe the number of years together? A measurement of my finger size? When I tell them it's a number line they're blank. "Oh I see," they say, not really seeing at all.

When I was 15 years old I fell in love with a number line. I was in bed, it was summer in Texas, and I was thinking about numbers and how they fit together. Suddenly, a thought came to me, the way these thoughts will, fully formed and thrilling, flinging me out of bed and to a pencil and piece of paper. I drew a number line and numbered it 0 to 10. Yes, it was really true, this thought I had! And I needed to share it: "Mother! Mother, look at this... How many points are there between 0 and 10? An infinite number. And how many points are between 0 and 1? An infinite number. And between .5 and .55? An infinite number! In fact, there are infinite numbers of infinities!" She didn't care. And neither did anyone else that summer. But I was in love! I drew my number line for anyone who came within 3 feet of me. I couldn't sleep at night thinking about it. All I wanted to do all summer was moon over my number line.

When I got back to school in the fall, the first thing I did was run to my geometry teacher, who has featured in my blog before. He was the first person I talked to who understood my crush and pointed me to various books on the subject. (As a side note, later as an adult it was great fun to come across the problem of multiple infinities listed in a book about the 7 greatest unsolved mathematical problems.)

Fast forward to 3 years ago, when my partner and I decided to exchange rings. We had discussed it many times in the years we had been together, but I always balked at the idea of anything that smacked of marriage in any form for all kinds of reasons. I didn't want people to look at a ring and make any kind of assumption that they understood my situation. It was really the concept of the number line that changed my mind. We all think we understand number lines: they're so dull we let small children use them for basic math, adding and subtracting. In fact, don't tell the children but number lines are subversive. We don't really understand them at all. Not only do they hold every number imaginable (and even the imaginary ones!) but they also are not really lines at all. They are home to infinities nesting inside one another, a stranger reality than we can possibly imagine, but a truer reality than we are able to see.

We humans need this, I guess. A construct that allows us to look reality in the face without seeing it. So someone may see my ring and assume they know me or my situation, but I know the ring is a construct, a representation of what I believe, what I value, what I desire, and the truth of my relationship can't be seen in the ring. The number line is to remind me of that if I start to feel constrained. But the ring, the construct, can maybe give a glimpse occasionally of how much bigger we really are than we think we are, how much more of the infinite we already contain and share with one another. And it can remind us to at least try, every now and then, to look behind look within look beneath look through the construct of self, of mind, of body. What nests inside? What looks back at you? What are we really?

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles