Pi(e) the Circle of Life

"It's the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle
The Circle of Life"     The Lion King

I am a little late in recognizing last Thursday, March 14 (3.14) as International Pi Day.  In addition to sharing the numerical symbol that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, it is also Albert Einstein's birthday - March 14, 1879.  There were just too many creative fun twists to this for me to let it slip away without playing with it.  After all, even pie that is a few days old is still tasty especially when it is reheated.  The inherent caution in this blog is that I am no mathematician or scientist.  So please take note of the yellow caution tape. As a writer, the symbolism was just too juicy.  I plead Einstein's quote: "Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world. "  So here goes..... 

Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be represented as a repeating or terminating decimal, as well as being a transcendental number, a number that is not the root of any polynomial with rational coefficients.  I have no clue what any of that means but I love the fact that it is both irrational and transcendent and that its digits appear to be randomly distributed.  Somehow because of all of this, it is impossible to square the circle.  And almost all real and complex numbers are transcendental numbers.  

Are you beginning to get the drift as to why I could not let this day pass without blogging about it.  Journeying from the status quo to the extraordinary is really about choosing the irrational over the predictable rational and transcending the apparent for the reality beyond the everyday mundane.  And just what is life but unpredictable?  Because we are rational beings, we love to think that there are patterns and causes and effects and that we can control our little sphere of influence.  Good luck with that - to be totally alive is to live on the edge where nothing is predictable and all is random.  Eckhart Tolle wrote, "All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind."  We must transcend the rational boundaries of our minds if we are ever to move to extraordinary.

As if that was not enough metaphors for life, there is Albert Einstein's birthday thrown in for good measure.  Einstein, indisputably a man of science, was also a man of the spirit.  As a student, he challenged his professor of philosophy who was making a case that God did not exist.  Proving to the professor that darkness and cold did not exist in and of themselves but were merely the lack of light and heat, Einstein then made the point, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself.  Evil is simply the absence of God.  It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God.  He went on to explain, "God did not create evil.  Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart.  It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."   In 1921, he wrote a book titled: God vs. Science.   He said, "I want to know God's thoughts.  The rest are details." 

Today, the schism between spirituality and science is closing and the two are moving closer together and becoming one as scientists become more informed as to the true nature of the universe.  Chaos Theory relies upon two main components that no matter how complex systems may be, there is an underlying order to them and very small or simple systems and events can cause very complex behaviors or events.  The discovery of the fact that the slightest difference in initial conditions, so small as to be unmeasurable, can make predictions of past or future outcomes impossible.  This has shaken the predictable world of physics.  As physicist, Richard Feynman says, "Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?"

So what does the fact that pi is randomly distributed, irrational, and transcendental and the evidence of the Chaos Theory of unpredictability and the impossibility of squaring the circle have to do with our journey to extraordinary?  Well for one, I think that it explains the appearance of lemons in our well ordered lives.  We put in motion what we think are the right variables and instead of getting the expected results, here is a lemon.  Science and Spirituality grapple with the big picture of life and both are saying that there is an underlying order and we are not in control.  So the best extrapolation is to let go and trust the process, check your intentions because that is what is going to influence the outcome and exhale.  As Einstein said, "The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."

Summing it up perfectly is this saying I saw recently on a wooden wall sign: "Life is truly a ride.  We're all strapped in and no one can stop it.  When the doctor slaps your behind, he's ripping your ticket and away you go.  As the years go by, sometimes you will put your arms up and scream, sometimes you will just hang onto that bar in front of you, but the ride is the thing.  I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair is messed up, you're out of breath and you didn't throw up." 


Here's a pi(e) use for your lemons, completing the circle.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/bill-clintons-lemon-chess-pie/detail.aspx