Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Concentric circles of life...

The attempt to mathematically represent life and its intricacies has fascinated people forever. I tried to model some elements from my life but my two D’s in Engineering Mathematics heralded the premature culmination of that pursuit.

I have, however, modeled some arbitrary reflection, conceived in a semi-conscious state (34 bottles of beer on the wall.. na na na na..) into a geometrical pattern.

Picture this… a surreal (!) concentric circle with you at the center of it. Each concentric circle around you (for those who failed Geometry 101) is at an increasing radius from you. The radius obviously determines the distance you put yourself from each of these circles. There are “n” such circles around you. Each circle has people, events and aspirations from your life on it.

How you place these elements on each circle is not a given. It’s a matter of choice. Most of these choices you have made at some crossroads in your life, while some are outside your direct control, and thus, are constants.

Your current predicament in life, your “happiness”, stress level, relationships and contentedness depends entirely on your arrangement of the elements on the existent circles. The circle with the smallest radius matters most to you. The people on it are the most important, the events and aspirations on it the most critical at that juncture in life.

The idea is that, to achieve true happiness and maybe even self-actualization, you have to obtain the perfect arrangement. The journey of life, thus, is a journey to making the right choices, finding the right people and the right priorities and arranging them correctly. From a suspended view, this little map is constantly changing. The tumultuous times in life are those in which you make a drastic change, for better or worse.

The number of people you let into your innermost circle is critical. If you have one person too many or too few, it can cause an imbalance. Further, if you let people sitting at the circumference of a distant circle affect you, you know there is something amiss.

It's ironical that we don’t see the magintude of the sphere our little life covers. Its much like our linear view, limited as far as the radii, but the true area it covers is a product of an exponential value of this distance and a constant, perhaps determined by our intrinsic nature.

Hmm... alpha beta x y z... 35 bottles of beer on the wall.. 35 bottles... na na na na.....

14 Comments:

Blogger kay said...

wow, maybe you're on to something here. the thing is though, i don't think there is a "perfect arrangment" to hit that point of true happiness. and one thing you don't take into consideration are all the internal factors, like a person's attitude (self-esteem?) or outlook on life.

ah, screw the internal factors. you're right, we all believe that rearranging our life to just the way we want it will make us happy.

May 26, 2005 at 2:02 AM  
Blogger Sayesha said...

Great article. If only they had let you write this in the Engineering Mathematics exams instead of the useless crap they taught.

May 27, 2005 at 4:45 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Creative! It is so simple, fresh & vivid.
Two most striking ideas in your piece...

"Your current predicament in life, your “happiness”, stress level, relationships and contentedness depends entirely on your arrangement of the elements on the existent circles."
It is an instinctive human nature to resist change, to avoid having to make choices...to avoid re-arranging elements on circles of life. Sometimes a bad choice is to not make one... hence the anxiety..

"Magnitude of the sphere our little lives cover..."
Reminds me of a heart-warming movie called 'It's a wonderful life' where an angel helps a compassionate but despairingly frustrated businessman by showing what life would had been like if he never existed.


Don't remember the last time you said something that made this much sense (sorry ahh.. compliment also must disguise wan..:p)

May 27, 2005 at 3:47 PM  
Blogger dUh said...

kay: i actually did take internal factors into account in the "constant" but yeah, screw em..

sayesha: actually, i did volunteer this information in the math paper, hence the D. no engineer appeciates creativity :(

anonymous: don't remember the last time you were so generous with compliments, disguised or otherwise.

May 30, 2005 at 1:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well here's the deal, i think your idea seems.. well an idea.. but to me, i'd say, its more like... assume you at the centre and just one whole circle around you.. no concentrics.. just one circle... i'd say, there's not much of a choice you can make on whom or what to pull into the closest circle.. however, i think its all a matter of perception where you have the knowledge and the inherent tendency to attach a certain level of significance to each entity in your circle... and ultimately fade out (erase??!?) out the rest. Ultimately, what you have is still the same circle.. but now, only with those entities that really matter. This we have in our control. On the whole, what i am trying to say is in your theory of concentric circles... the whole idea of happiness comes in if you just lose all the outer circles and just be contented with the innermost circles... i.e. just acknowledge, accept, cherish what you are attached to or associate with...

ps - jobless aren't you!

May 30, 2005 at 11:10 AM  
Blogger dUh said...

Vinay: It's really a personal choice whether you let the outer circles fade away or exist in dischord. The basic reason for them existing in my view is social conformism. Besides you and I, most people do give a rat's ass about society and its perception of you...

PS: I actually am jobless.. what's your excuse?

June 1, 2005 at 12:36 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

same lor... not been working much these days!

June 2, 2005 at 1:53 PM  
Blogger Princessse said...

though there is quite a broad discussion of various metaphors for life and its analysis, the idea of concentric cirlces as a metaphor is very fresh indeed.. I think you should work on this idea of yours and give it some proper dimensions =). I'm sure it'll be very useful to those people who are trying to understand the significance of those things / people that exist / occur in their lives...

Really, you're onto something here - it's well thought out...

June 26, 2005 at 7:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like the analogy.

The Zen way of life then, is to have no circles, or all circles are empty. Fits well with the clarity that one associates with the Zen!

July 6, 2005 at 1:53 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would appreciate more visual materials, to make your blog more attractive, but your writing style really compensates it. But there is always place for improvement

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