Yes, you can chase away all your boogies, too. Confront your
anxieties head-on. It's as simple as one-two-three.
I never particularly understood the importance of math. In
seventh grade Math honors, I remember asking our teacher what
was the point of algebra, anyway. Here was a perfect
opportunity to enlighten us with the significance of what we
were learning. Here was a chance to mention that besides
calculating one's grocery receipts, mathematics could
actually be quite relevantly applied to a career in
engineering, for example, or any simple backyard building
construction. At the very least, he could have jokingly said,
"You can someday teach math!" But unfortunately, the
educational opportunity was lost when our math teacher, a
short, slightly plump fellow with kind brown eyes and a thick
mustache, a generally agreeable person, responded simply and
unsatisfactorily by saying, "Because you have to learn
it!"
I remember my last year of school. There was one math
professor who so loved her subject that she taught with great
gusto and enthusiasm. She was a petite blonde with sparkling
blue eyes who smiled a lot. One day, she interjected into her
lesson that the Cartesian coordinate plane that we were
studying was invented by Rene Descartes, a French
Mathematician who lived about five hundred years ago.
Apparently, as the story goes, Rene Descartes was not a
healthy child and spent many long and boring hours lying sick
in bed. It must have been during one of these desperately
mind-numbing days that he noticed a fly on the ceiling.
Without much else to think about, he began to consider how
one could communicate the exact position of this fly to
someone else not present in the room. One could divide the
ceiling with two imaginary lines, line X running horizontally
and Y running perpendicularly, intersecting in the middle at
the zero, zero point. Now the ceiling had four clear
quandrants and Rene could simply state that the fly was three
spaces to the left of the zero point and four spaces up. Thus
were X and Y coordinates in space invented.
My professor's little interjected anecdote added an
interesting dimension to my perspective. Actual human beings,
not so different from myself, created this stuff. They were
people with names, interests, hobbies and even illnesses, who
actually lived in a historical framework, in a grid of time
and space.
*
Now all this occurred years ago. And though I still didn't
particularly enjoy or excel in math, I approached it as one
does a puzzle that needs all of its pieces to be placed
together in perfect fit. Numbers always had a nice reliable
logic to them; you could `count' on them to work out
satisfactorily if you applied the appropriate rules for
deciphering their formulations.
Then, one night in my adult life, when I already lived in
Israel, I had a nightmare. For some unknown reason that only
my subconscious mind understands, I had this bad dream. In
it, I was clearly in trouble. I was failing my math course
and I would not be allowed to graduate high school unless I
passed. Had I actually experienced such fear in real life? I
tried to recall.
Over the next decade, at unpredictable intervals of say,
several months apart, I continued to be plagued by different
versions of this same math-anxiety dream. It would just
appear in my nightly visions, cropping up unexpectedly with
no noticeable connection to my real, awake life. The theme
was always the same: if I didn't pass the test, I would NOT
be able to graduate!
It was an amusing, though annoying, experience to awaken in
Jerusalem, to my full life as an observant Jew, and find
myself momentarily stuck back in Baldwin, New York, or in
upstate Ithaca. Finally, just about two and a half years ago,
I cured myself of this recurring, nocturnal noxiousness by
having my present consciousness confront this dream state
head on.
Very simply, it went like this:
In the dream, I am sitting at my desk, holding in one hand
another math examination marked 57%. There is a letter in my
other hand stating how many math credits one needed to have
in order to matriculate. Suddenly, I stand up, fully attired
as a chareidi woman, with head covering, long sleeved blouse,
a full skirt, maybe I was even pregnant, and I announce quite
forcefully:
"Listen here! I am a mother of five children and I don't
live in America anymore! I graduated high school over twenty
years ago! I passed math eons ago! I don't need this dream!
And I do not want to dream this anymore! Is that
clear?"
And that was the end of that.
