Photo credit: Idahostudios
A friend of mine told me that her son, when envisioning a calendar, sees it in a circular fashion. The days loop around in his head; he sees the year at a glance, so to speak, instead of MY vision which is a snapshot of a hanging wall calendar, a month at a time.
Her son is also a music prodigy. He can pick up any instrument and learn to play it in short order – even the violin. It took me years of practice on the violin before I was able to perform adequately.
So what does this mean? My way of thinking is static – I see in my mind’s eye a month of dates in 2-D. Andrew sees, perhaps, a 3-D view of dates, a continuum of days and months and years. A bigger picture – more complex, or simpler? Because I can’t read his mind, I can’t see what he sees, but I like the concept – it would appear to be a high-level view as opposed to my microscopic view.
And if this type of thought is applied to music – the ability to learn holistically, to pick up an instrument, sound out the notes, and make the instrument thrum and sing without instruction – what a gift! It’s so much more inspiring than learning a note at a time, which leads to scales, to short pieces, to longer pieces, finally to being part of an orchestra where all the sounds work together in one large composition. Andrew is already the composer.
How can we learn to think in a circular fashion? What linear things can be refashioned into circular things? How about a story where the ending becomes the beginning again? Or a movie that keeps going? Can we make our lives more circular – instead of the linear progression from birth, to childhood, to young adulthood, to middle age, old age, and death, can we take pieces from each and live a little differently in each age?
I’ve often referred to my son Alex as Peter Pan, who has never wanted to embrace the responsibilities of adulthood, but has done so with a decent amount of grace. Smart and lovable, he may hold the secret to youth – cartoons and a fervent love of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Not yet out of his teens, he can get away with it – but I envision him in his 50’s still fixing mac & cheese while watching Transformers or SpongeBob.
This may reek of slacker tendencies, but having lived my life always striving for the next level/goal/achievement and forgoing a lot of fun in the process, I like this image.
