Math just doesn't work when calculating love and happiness
I was at my local pet store last week, sheepishly addressing the owner’s questioning eyebrows upon seeing the two bags of food I plopped down on the counter.
“I don’t know. She seems to like the salmon and sweet potato one, but I know as soon as I buy the 30 lb bag, she won’t. And she really likes the grain free beef, but it makes her poop too dry…”
“You have a problem,” the owner, Julie, said, but she was smiling, because she knows that I really don’t. She knows that my love for Rei knows no bounds, and I will try all of the canned, fresh, frozen, freeze dried, and air dried foods she carries until I find the combo that satisfies my dog and me.
Or I suppose she could also have been smiling because I spend more at that darn store on my dog than I do on my human self at the grocery store across the parking lot.
As usual, aside from my pet food woes, we were discussing life, and I was telling her that Rei and I were heading to Spokane that Thursday and Friday to meet up with a close friend and her family who were traveling from San Francisco for a family wedding.
“You are driving 5 hours each way to meet up with a friend for a few hours?” Julie asked, surprised.
I realized how accustomed we are to making things add up. If the math doesn’t work, then we often don’t pursue things. Like finding the right combo of dog food or going out of our way to spend time with someone we really care about.
And I also realized how we can fudge the math over really important things just to make the math work.
I did just that for years, telling myself if I just added this bit to myself or subtracted that part from myself to fit in with partners or friends or family, then I would be loved unconditionally. That math turned into some nuclear fission equation and blew up in a series of chain reactions instead, and I was always left abandoned by those I was trying so hard to abandon my truest self for. Until I was willing to overcome the fear of being alone and discovered that I am a whole number as I am.
Or there was drinking math, which looked something like this. If I am not homeless, getting DUIs, or on the liver transplant list and I am working out regularly and am employed and liked then my drinking is not a problem. It is just a reward for being a martyr to X, Y, or Z at the end of each day. Unlike the other math, this math worked really freaking well. As long as I ignored the mental ping pong match that is cognitive dissonance, knowing I was meant for a better life than the booby prize of alcohol and superficial okayness, yet zombie-ing up to the wine each night nonetheless.
Thankfully, I freed myself from this faulty math, too, and my new drinking math involves only occasionally checking my app to see how many dollars ($24,277.38) and calories (783,620.11) I have saved since I had my last drink November 3, 2022.
My current life math always seems to yield a non-numeric value. It is not infinity, because I am not looping any longer. It is ‘undefined’. According to Google, there is no universally accepted symbol for an undefined value in mathematics. I am good with that, with making up my own symbol, even if it feels scary and looks a bit wonky at times.