Life’s Order of Operations
Math+Life #21, March 9, 2020
( ) ( ) ( )
They keep you safe,
Envelope you with comfort,
Give you a home,
Enhance your childhood,
Always always there,
Stuck forever, some say,
Make you who you are,
Push you off the ground,
Or never let you fly,
Keep them close,
With them,
You will always belong.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^
She forces you to crumble the comfort,
Fly fly fly,
Higher and higher and higher,
Up the ladder,
Reach further than the stars,
Further than the moon,
There’s always more and more and more,
Your potential remains as high as heaven,
Don’t stay down there, she tells you,
Come on up.
X X X X X
Then come your companions,
They laugh with you,
They cry with you,
They’re always there for you,
You love them,
They multiply as you grow,
The more of them,
The happier we feel,
It’s quite simple,
They’re just your friends.
/ / / / /
Beam balance of your heart comes next,
She knows your secrets,
She knows your desires,
She knows which is more,
What should I say,
Important to you,
Is it the comfort,
Is it the stars,
Which will weigh more,
And she’s sly,
She knows you try,
To make it weigh all the same,
Balance and equate all aspects,
But it’s never like that,
You know it,
She knows it.
+ + + + +
Then he scurries beside you,
Ready to collect everything,
Plus plus plus,
Collect collect collect,
Chink chink chink,
The memories registering,
Each one,
Happy bouncing,
Sad rolling,
Fear slithering,
Anger stomping,
Piling up like a mountain of your past,
Each memory adds to you,
Changing the way your algorithm and reactions work,
Making you a different person,
Not necessarily better,
He smiles.
_ _ _ _ _
And finally the worst arrives,
She sits next to him,
As he clunks all the memories together,
And she searches for the one,
That makes you a worse person,
Provides you a dark lens of the world,
Clutches it in her shaking hands,
And throws it away,
The memory crumpling like paper,
Some of us hate her,
We want to keep everything bottled up,
We keep her locked away,
But subtracting things creates more room,
It removes the sorrow,
And helps us grow,
Some of us don’t realize that at all.
( ) ^ X / + –
These are the things some value most,
Some more important than the others,
I guess this could be called the ‘PEMDAS of Life’.
Math Connect
In this poem, I used the concept of systems of operations also known as PEMDAS, consisting of the following components:
PEMDAS:
Parenthesis ( )
Exponents ^
Multiply x
Division /
Addition +
Subtraction –
The concept of PEMDAS is important for solving equations as this lays down the order in which we perform the above mathematical operations.
I connected this concept of PEMDAS to priorities in our lives. For example, parentheses represent a safe space like our family, exponents is our career, multiplication is friendship, division is balance, addition is saving our memories, and subtraction is letting go of things. The listing of these priorities are only ‘my opinion’ and could vary for everyone.
