“My feelings of love are hard to explain. My love for others. My love for each breath I am privileged to take.
It’s hard to explain to others. It’s hard to explain to myself.
In our physical world, there are no words adequate to explain the complexity of our universe. Those who provide the most precise explanations use the language of mathematics. A formula that describes what happened in the past, what is happening now, and what we expect will happen in the future.
We invent the word gravity to explain the consistent and almost unbelievable observation of a magical attraction between every tiny particle across that vastness of our universe. It is an attempt to describe something that cannot really be described or understood.
When I look at the night sky, a feeling of awe emerges. That feeling of awe about an incomprehensible and magnificent universe is fully justified. But my feeling of love seems even more real than that feeling of awe; even more incomprehensible and even more magnificent.
Here’s my best attempt at a mathematics of love. It started almost the same as Cheryl Strayed’s story in Wild: her mother asking her children how much she loved them as she gradually moved her hands apart. It becomes clear you can’t hold your hands far enough apart.
One of my children has precocious mathematical abilities (explaining the Fibonacci series to me at age 8) and some social limitations(?) from an ever moving position on the autism spectrum. Perhaps influenced by Pixar’s Toy Story, at age five he absolutely nailed the mathematics of love:
“I love you to infinity and back.”
Me too buddy. Me too.”
– Will Hard, Publisher, Attempted Love
