My Native Language

Sometimes the most important discoveries are not about the future. They’re about finally understanding your past.

Why Was I Restless?

I was reading The Battle for Your Brain when I found myself becoming restless.

It wasn’t the subject. I remain fascinated by the legal and ethical questions surrounding emerging technologies. In fact, those very questions led me to apply to the Master of Legal Studies program at The College of William & Mary. Yet after fifty pages, my attention had wandered somewhere else.

I closed the book.

Why?

Why was I restless?

That simple question carried me back more than forty years.

As a child, I couldn’t sit still. Today, someone might suggest ADHD. Years ago, after describing to a therapist how some days I felt as though you couldn’t possibly give me enough to do while on other days I felt completely listless, I was prescribed Ritalin. It helped.

But sitting there with the book in my lap, another question quietly emerged:

What if my restless mind had been trying to tell me something all along?

When Mathematics Came Alive

When I returned to college at twenty-five, I wasn’t chasing a dream. I had spent three years managing a mall specialty store. I was married, raising a young family, and knew only that I wanted something more. So I enrolled at San Bernardino Valley College and began taking the required general education courses.

Mathematics was simply one of them.

Beginning algebra became intermediate algebra. Geometry followed. Then trigonometry. Then pre-calculus. Eventually I transferred to California State University, San Bernardino and declared accounting as my major. It seemed like the responsible thing to do.

Then something unexpected happened.

I earned the highest grade in the toughest introductory accounting course in the department.

And I was bored.

Not frustrated.

Not overwhelmed.

Bored.

The mathematics classes felt completely different.

Not easier.

They were Alive.

Every semester became another invitation to think in motion. A graph bent across a page. A proof unfolded. A geometric figure rotated. One idea became another.

Mathematics refused to sit still...
…and neither did my mind.

So I changed my major.

At the time, I assumed I was simply choosing the subject I enjoyed more.

Looking back now, I think I had the story backwards.

A Pencil in Motion

I never experienced mathematics as a collection of numbers.

It wasn’t static.

It wasn’t something to memorize.

It was something to enter.

My pencil was almost always in motion.

I wasn’t simply writing answers.

I was sketching possibilities.

A line became a triangle.

A triangle became a proof.

An erasure became another attempt.

Long before I understood why, my notebook had become less a record of mathematics than a record of thought.

The work had rhythm.

Looking back at those pages today, I don’t simply see mathematics.

I see movement.
I see velocity and magnitude.

Vectors are almost innocent-looking on a page, yet a single arrow tells an entire story. Once understood, vectors become movement in graphic form. Those notebooks remind me that I wasn’t merely solving problems. My pencil was tracing the way my mind explored the world.

The Same Mind at Work

Years later, after my first marriage ended, I found myself working for a landscape construction company. For two years I built paver driveways, patios, and retaining walls.

Looking back, I realize it was another laboratory.

Geometry was no longer confined to a sheet of paper. It became string lines, elevations, right angles, patterns, weight, and stone. Before a shovel ever touched the ground, the project had already been built and rebuilt in my imagination.

Shift this line.

Rotate that angle.

Move the border.

Start again.

My hands simply followed where my mind had already gone.

I wasn’t simply building patios.

I was thinking the same way I always had.