I have navigation equipment and
sometimes it works for me on my water.
Sometimes it doesn’t work anywhere. Unfortunately it’s the only
equipment I know how to use.
One thing I’ve learned in life is
to not always trust finding my own way, or trust my own thinking. Just because a thought occurs to me doesn’t
mean it’s true. A new direction isn’t
always a good direction. I seek advice
from others because I know they might see where I have blind spots. And I’ve also learned that when I don’t
understand something … when I’m having trouble navigating my seas or anyone’s … I can instead go by the
numbers. An engineer friend calls it
“trusting the math.”
For example, I’ve never been good
at accurately estimating distances, either of the geographical or emotional
variety. If I’m near a ship at sea and I
want to travel completely around it in a circle while staying a mile away, my
sense of things tells me the trip around will be about 3 miles. The actual distance is over six miles, twice what
my intuition tells me.
There’s a well known formula for
calculating the perimeter of a circle and if I use it I’ll come up with the
right answer every time. I’ve learned to
use the formula instead of assuming what I think is correct. My sense of distance is useless. If I want a true answer, I should do the math
and trust it.
Sometimes the math can be very
simple, such as when I watch evidence add up that shows I should be fixing a
dripping pipe in the basement. I can kid
myself, thinking I’ll eventually get to the chore and all will be OK in the
meantime, but when I count the number of days I’ve seen water on the cellar
floor and trust the math, I’ll know it’s
time to get out the tools.
The same simple math also tells
me when I skip my morning meditation more than a couple times each week, I
become selfish and petty.
It would be great for people like me if there
was a type of math I could use for relationships. When I sensed trouble brewing
with my wife, I could simply run the numbers and use the result to answer her
needs. I’d plug all the factors into a
formula, get out my old slide rule and solve the equation for an answer no one could refute.
With that
kind of math, I’d be right all the time. But I wouldn’t be as loveable.
copyright
2016 by David Griffin
The
Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet,
South
Carolina
www.windsweptpress.com
