A little known fact about me: my sole defining ambition in life (and surprise surprise, I do not have many), constructed since my youth aged 17.5 years, is to be deeply and passionately expert in two fields: mathematics and music.
This is something I think you only found out recently too, as you contemplated Christmas presents.
A friend of mine commented yesterday on IM that I am by far the most adventurous, ambitious and talented person he knew. I can readily admit to the first, but not to the second or the third. I like attempting the difficult or impossible (adventurous). I do not like being told I cannot (adventurous, potentially contrary). I refuse to believe I am not born to do certain things (ditto).
But ambitious? Besides the ambition listed above, I have only one other ambition. And that is to make a difference by showing people that things are possible. To be an inspiration to others simply by defying the laws and norms of Possible and Impossible. Perhaps this is the biggest, most ambitious thing of all.
But let's come back to the first ambition, and of music and mathematics. Let's talk about laws, and the ways of the world.
I was born into a family that believed that there is no mathematical gene in the family gene pool. This is a belief, a strongly cultivated one, and as a child I was encouraged into the arts, history, the humanities, literature. I can't draw to save my life or play Pictionary. But one thing I could do since the age of two was play a tune on my favourite electric toy piano. My first song (don't laugh please) was Chariots of Fire. My mother quickly recognized this and packed me off to music classes (de rigour of Singaporean parents) and I started Yamaha classes on the organ before I was tall enough to have my feet touch the pedals of the organ while keeping my hands firmly on the keyboard. I was about as tall as the organ itself, and needless to say, this turned out to be quite a disaster since it was evidently an important thing to be taller than the musical instrument that one is playing.
Enter the piano, attempted for 5 years between the ages of 7 and 11 before being painfully told that should I quit, I was never to start piano lessons again. I promptly gave it up in favour of French lessons, because the latter didn't require me to ever perform in front of my parents if I didn't want to, or practice daily in earshot of my neighbours.
Along the way, I was also introduced to the recorder, standard issue between the ages of 13 and 16 in all schools. I usually fared miserably at any formal lessons in music.
I was equally dismal in formal mathematics classes until I entered university, surprisingly surviving mathematics classes until then. The problem with mathematics was that it was similar to music in one unnecessary way: you needed to practice practice practice. Teachers, principals and parents gave up one by one by the mystery of the fact that I could only do a problem sum, play a tune by heart, string up a composition on the piano without a glitch only by accident, if I set my mind to it. But tell me to do something, tell me to solve a problem sum in a certain way, and almost certainly, my mind rebels and I am suddenly unable, physically unable to do it.
It was only until university when I realised that mathematics was more than the study of computation, a science that was only taught in schools. It was an art, the logic of understanding and expressing, in a clear and defined language, the underlying way and law of the world. It was my key to being the observer from the outside in, the path in which I could finally resolve the many puzzles of human behaviour and the natural world once and for all in my mind.
Music worked the same way for me. There are natural steps, notes which exist, notes which don't. Seven notes in solid white setting the structure for a melody, five in black to fill in the gaps. Tune it upward and gaps suddenly turn to structure, white to black. My favourite key, incidentally, is E minor.
Suddenly without these things, the world wouldn't exist for me. I realized that, similar to being born with perfect pitch, I had been subconsciously counting things, measuring things. The size of round pots fitting into shelves, the dimensions of luggage in an overhead carrier, the number of people in a crowded train, the time it takes to walk from home to the train station. The moment it becomes conscious, and I realise that I am counting, I lose the number. But these things float by me and surround me, day after day, like many lost dreams. There was a fact and a certainty, a certain measure of solidness in the fact that things were countable.
Why am I telling you these things? Because you, of many people, have always wondered what it was like to see what I see, and hear what I hear. This is my way of explaining to you that the things that we see, feel, react to, touch, hear, smell, and sense are exactly our world as we know it. This explains why when I buy things, I always buy in pairs or threes if I can help it. Why I believe that there are perfect numbers. Why I look at my watch, not to tell the time, but to be assured that it is still there. Without these things I am quite possibly, in my own beliefs, insane.
The world to me is a measure of all things. How many, how long, how high, how sharp. How do I love thee, let me count the ways. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had expressed it perfectly. But let me count the ways and the steps and the measures to more than Love. Let me count the measures to Life itself.
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