Calculus

I remember it like yesterday, the horrible cold clinging black cloud of frustration and humiliation of “not getting” calculus.

To that point in life, math had always been easy for me, trivial, “do-it-in-your-head” easy, tangible, nice, chunky, visual, everything fitting precisely and predictably. And then came calculus.

Calculus. Slippery, slidy, imprecise, it seemed more like alchemy and the occult. Worse, it was at summer school with weeks compressed into days, truckloads, one after another of formulas and equations which could as well have been Chinese or cuneiform to me. Terrifying.

For the first time in my life I faced the likelihood of ignominious academic failure. I was shipwrecked, a drowning man sinking below the waves for at least the tenth time. The sky was leaden, the waves cold and heavy. All was lost, notwithstanding hours and hours of homework and exercises and study guides And burning candles, not for religion but for reading. Well, yes, there was some prayer, too, of the foxhole variety.

But then the epiphany.

It was one afternoon in the old U of O basement cafeteria, long after everyone had left and the lights were mostly out. In the evening twilight the heavens opened and the angels sang. A sweet calm filled my soul. Calculus instantly made sense. Not only made sense, but it belonged to me in its entirety, elegant, pure, powerful, precious.

Just like that.

Now all of this is not to exalt myself as some kind of math genius, because I’m not. There must be several billion people who also “get” calculus, most of them better than I. What it is meant to illuminate is the magic of epiphany.

Epiphany is that wonderful thing that comes to us in our troubles when we allow it. Epiphany is the result of at least two things: doing a lot of hard work to feed the subconscious all the information it needs, then allowing it to work its magic and make the connections.

Not all of our conundrums (conundra?) have to do with calculus, but most of them can be solved by letting the subconscious do its work, provided, that is, we’re willing to put in the hard work to set the subconscious up for success, and to be willing to listen to it when it speaks.