The world is a complex place. And to live in this complicated space filled with novelties and surprises in every corner, each one of us adopts an eye through which one views the world. I make sense of the world through numbers. Everything I see somehow manages to enter my head as a series of numerals and I endeavor to find a certain pattern among those to understand it. So, let me introduce you to my daily interactions with numbers.
One, two, three, four, five… wait why am I counting this? This is what is typically happening inside my head as I walk up the stairs leading to my dorm room. As soon as my feet touch the first step, my brain proceeds to count the number of steps. Not only that, but I also get quite unexplainably annoyed if the number of stairs is odd.
Another example. In high school, my locker was number 257. As you may have already guessed, the first thing I noticed when I received this number was 2+5=7. So naturally, I loved it. Or let’s consider my dad’s car license plate. It reads 1086 and the first thought that flew to my conscience was that 108 is a multiple of 6. This realization brought a wave of katharsis to my mind, as to me, it was a perfect, satisfying combination of numbers.
If it were only this, however, that I like finding patterns in numbers, it would be merely a strange habit. But numbers signify much more for me. I associate the objects around me with numbers. For example, each subject is labeled with a number inside my head. Math has long been a 33, English has been an 8, Chemistry was a 15 and Physics was an 18. Therefore, through my eyes, Chemistry plus Physics equals Math. This was one of the reasons why I secretly liked it when my high school schedule had placed my Chemistry, Physics and Math class in a row in one day, in that order. Nowadays, although I do not have classes in Chemistry and Physics anymore, I am still reminded of these numbers when I see such content.
This is how the world presents itself to me. Wherever I go, I see numbers and whenever I see them, I find a pattern. Numbers are the eyes that translate the complexity of the world to me. Oftentimes, these translations are somewhat intuitive on my part as I am unable to explain logically why I associate certain numbers with specific objects, but they happen naturally for me. Now, how do you read the world?