Today it dawned on me...

I had an epiphany today while browsing books at Borders.

All through grade school I was in the top five of the best math students in my class. Never number one; that was Paul Wallulis, the smartest kid in our school. He now teaches math at Central Catholic HS. I loved math and always thought I was pretty good at it. In high school I understood algebra, loved geometry, managed trig, but ran into an absolute brick wall in advanced math/calculus. The only thing I understood was the analogy of the the frog that hops halfway to the end of the table with each jump. I got it that he would never reach the end but would get infinitely close that you could say he was there. When I took chemistry, the math kicked my butt, even though I loved science. So I came to the realization I wasn't so smart in math. In fact, it drove me to seek after an arts degree. At CCC, I took all literature, writing and social science classes to the extent I could. (The best I remember of college algebra was Mrs. Kondo, who was less than five feet tall, not being able to figure out someone hid the chalk on top of the chalkboard each class and she would have to leave for five minutes to go get more.) Thus, I feel I write good...I mean well.

When I transferred to BYU, the only degree they offered for business was a B.S. Thus I had to go back and take science classes to meet the graduation requirements. Fortunately, they understood there were people like me, and the bone-head classes they offered dealt with theory as opposed to mathematical proofs, and I got through physics understanding the concepts of the laws without having to prove the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. My friends in the honors program or pre-med took real physics, and I said a prayer of thanks everytime I saw them with a book four inches thick, slaving over proofs and story problems each night. The closest I got to real math at BYU was the business statistics class and, once again, my butt got kicked. And I really like statistics and understand averages (mean, median and mode), standard deviation, bell curves, etc. But the advanced stuff stymied me. My day-to-day math knowledge and skills have served me well in banking. I can handle the math of money and do it well.

So today in Borders I found myself in the reference section and noticed a number of AP books for people wanting to bone up on those kinds of classes. I picked up the AP Calculus book and opened to the middle and started looking at the equations. To my utter suprise and after nearly forty years, I understood them. I read more and grasped what the equation was trying to calculate. I remembered integrals, summation, notation and other concepts. I thought to myself, "I understand this. I could do this. I can do this!"

And there was my epiphany. I picked up some other advanced course books and realized I understand more than I thought I do. In fact, as I picked up a philosophy book, I remembered the story of Socrates sending his student Plato to find the wisest man in Greece. After a long search and speaking with the top scholars in the land who each declared themselves to be the smartest person, Plato returned to his mentor and report that he, Plato, was the wisest man in Greece because he realized he did not know everything and grasped Aristotle's admonition to him to alway seek learning.

As I started to leave Borders, I wondered, "Why couldn't I have been this smart forty years ago? I would be so much smarter, wiser and useful today if I understood then what I grasp now." I looked over the store and wished I could read all the books in there. There is so much to learn...and a lot less time to learn it...