August is when and why I'm relearning Math
The start of August has been like a complex math problem for me.
It's one of those stretches where a hole opens up in your chest and it feels like it has no bottom. So you spend the whole time trying to fill it with meaning and purpose.
The question is always the same.
Am I doing everything I can for my family?
And can I keep doing it without burning out?
I know that edge well. I've stood close to it plenty of times and I've never gone over. But I've noticed something about the way I stop. I stop before it breaks me. I don't always stop before it costs anyone else. My family has paid for a few of my late nights in ways I didn't bother counting at the time.
Maybe it's just my body adjusting. We started making matcha at home, two or three in the afternoon, and it's become the part of the day I look forward to.
Or maybe it was last weekend's canon event.
We've all been pulled out of our own timeline by that same one question.
Am I doing enough?
And notice how small that ask really is. Not great. Not impressive. Just enough. We want enough to be the lowest we ever go, not the highest we ever reach.
Is it wrong to set our base well before reaching for the stars?
I'm not going in blind, either. The clues are already in front of me. The Pareto principle. The edge of my comfort zone. The limit of the skills I have right now.
But none of it is something I can hold in my hands. Nothing like open a small coffee shop. Start an online business. Write a book.
I have dreams. That was never the problem.
The problem is that under all of it, there's a math problem I keep walking past. I've been treating it like a feeling. It isn't. It's numbers, and I roughly know what they are.
That's the strange part. I'm not missing the information. I just never sit down and do the actual math. I estimate. I get close enough. I move on and hope the gap doesn't matter.
And I don't think that it's just plain laziness. I think I was trained into it. Somewhere along the way I learned that math is something other people do carefully, and that my job is to wing it and stay likable while doing so. It worked well enough for years, so I never questioned it.
I've been here before with something else. For years I told myself I had a bad memory. It turned out I didn't. I just had no method. Nobody showed me how remembering actually works, so I filled the gap with a story about myself, and the story gave me permission to stop trying. Once I learned the method, the problem mostly stopped being a problem.
"I'm not a math person" is that same sentence wearing different clothes. It isn't a fact about me. It's a method I never learned, and a habit I was handed.
So that's the rest of August for me. Not solving anything yet. Just sitting down with the thing I've been walking past, and letting it be ordinary.
I can't believe I'm saying this but...
It's time to do some math.
On the other hand, I feel like when I finally get a hang of the math that I have to, I'll have a life where all my attention will be on loving and taking good care of everyone I love.