Jack was tired of endless approximations; he couldn’t quite pin down the things that seemed important —god, explanations, love, even life itself. Nothing was a whole number and every time he quantified these things to put them in the equation he was building he got a different answer. Time to try some rounding he thought, or time to stop counting.
One of everything seemed to be the simplest starting point— one life, one love, one god, one explanation but there were still too many optional ways to live, too many types of love, too many faces of god, too many explanations to choose from.
He was hanging washing out on the clothesline for his mum because the teachers were on strike and he was wondering if there was another planet somewhere where life-forms had evolved to do something similar and if they had, had they also solved the problem of holding enough clothes pegs in one hand for a king-sized sheet while stretching it out and keeping it from knocking over the potted geraniums. He was also wondering if other life-forms also felt as weirdly anachronous as he did standing at the clothesline with the warm sun on his back, a light breeze, a bright sky and the sound of small waves rippling on the shore. It came to him when his mind was distracted by the other side of the universe that there were potential overlaps in his categories. Maybe he could exploit this to simplify the math: if I combine god with explanation and life with love it would reduce the options considerably, he thought. If I could just live a life in love with god then everything would be transparently clear. I could go about my business with a happy benevolent smile and thank god occasionally for being the explanation. A bit like a rural Church of England vicar doing his rounds on a bicycle or a Methodist lay preacher with his trousers rolled up paddling in the sea hand in hand with his grandson.
Or what, he thought, if I combined them all, if life contained its own explanation and that explanation was god and god was love then I could be anything I wanted to be and he happy all the time, even as a monk, a hermit, a Zen master, or a wizened old man in a cave. But Jack had a bad back from spending most of his time slouched behind a desk at school, slouched on the couch at home or slouched on the side of his bed at night surfing the internet for answers that surely were out there, and the thought of hard beds, squatting on the floor and having pins and needles when praying or meditating wasn’t that appealing.
He did feel he was getting somewhere with this line of thinking though. Maybe, he thought things never added up because they were co-dependent variables. For instance if explanations were tuned down to zero, then god, as closely associated with explanations would be tuned down too. Or he could just accept that he was never going to experience the type of love he wanted so he could tune it down. The consequences for life though if it was co-dependent could be catastrophic — without the hope of the perfect love he had always longed for, perhaps life would tune out as well.
OK, he thought making up his mind, chairs always wobble but three-legged stools are stable on all surfaces; one variable had to go and of the four it had to be god. After all there was no real evidence or logic for god; he had just been brought up with the assumption that there was. The concept had been useful in the past as it united a tribe and empowered them to kill neighboring tribes and steal their cattle and their good-looking daughters without all the drawbacks of guilt. And it wasn’t a big adjustment to his thinking anyway. Religions could be left in place but just re-purposed. Elderly ladies needed a social outlet other than Bingo, and what society could do without mother and toddler groups, Pilates classes, coffee and tray-bake mornings, and indoor bowls and badminton leagues subsidized by taxpayers.
Sunday schools are different though he thought. If god was being dismissed from the equations he had been working on, then really the brain-washing clubs should be dismantled. Still children were resilient; hadn’t he come through the process OK? Attendances were falling, churches were closing and turning into carpet shops so these things would die out naturally. As he relaxed, one last box presented itself for ticking. What type of godless person should he be. Was he an atheist? Was pantheism also out the picture? He thought of the atheists he knew, mostly annoying little pricks who were more fundamentalist and dogmatic than the believers they either pitied or reviled. They were obsessive and illogical. If there was no god it made no sense to define oneself as not believing in something that didn’t exist. They totally missed the point. They weren’t team-players, just liked spouting. The professionals were alright, casting new light in dark places and promoting critical thinking, but the amateurs were worse than Jehovah’s Witnesses with their idiotic repetition of predictable fallback phrases, inability to control their self-righteousness and their disdainful lack of empathy for other people’s emotional responses to existential questions. They let the side down, so no, he wouldn’t be an atheist. Everything would go — no god so no theism, deism, pantheism, atheism; zilch.
Right, life is a given, I have to keep that one he thought. Explanations had to stay; too risky to tune them down in his life. If meaning disappeared with explanations then it might be hard to keep on living normally; I could end up writing nonsense he thought with a wry smile. All of which left only love as something to simplify. If he rounded his calculations of it, it would approximate to zero he smiled again, ruefully this time, though to be fair he was confusing sex and love in his haste, though to be even fairer he did have a heck of a lot of hormones and existential confusion coursing round his body. If I have to fix it as a constant he thought, what number should it have? Maybe the maximum value of love was only ever a half. Well in the way he often imagined it, it would be. But what if three or more people were in love with each other? Would the value of love increase arithmetically or geometrically? (Again sex was distracting from his intended line of thought, but he was sure if he could only get the sex out of the way that love would surely follow; and now that he had dispensed with god this was an easier conclusion to come to.) I hope I don’t have to resort to calculus he frowned (for a change). Calculus had passed over his head in math class and somewhat ironically the harder he had tried to understand it the less intuitive it had become.
Jack was clipping the last pillowslip to the clothesline when he had an inspiration that made his heart race. He hadn’t considered negative numbers. Maybe some parameters of life and god and love and even explanations were positive and others negative and the objective shouldn’t be to find the perfect number to explain each, but to assign appropriate weights to each parameter so that the totals cancelled out, or even totaled one! If he got the formula right then other people with different personalities could change the weights to suit their objectives or circumstances. I could even build an app he mused and make some money out of all the angst and confusion out there; but then not everybody appreciated the importance of math the way he did. This needs more thought he muttered to himself gathering up the laundry basket and clothes pegs, returning inside and putting the kettle on to make his mum the cup of tea he had promised her.
