It’s winter where I live, and volleyball and badminton are two very common games that are played throughout winter, mostly after dusk. In the small puddle of grass and cobblestones right in-front of my house, at the stroke of 19:30-45, a few kids gather around to play volleyball.
They don’t have enough money to buy equipment for the game,and they don’t seem to care either. A well worn football, and a dividing line drawn by a chunk of a red brick, and they’re good to go.
I get a pretty premium view of the game from my room,so I just stand by the window and watch the ball float around in open air, like a free metronome from one end to the other. I look at the game, and I think of distance and the entropy of distance.
The entire game is balanced like the performance of a ballet dancer, on the footprints of distance. The players automatically shrink and expand the distance between themselves,by gauging the movement of ball in the air,with little to no communication at all. It’s as if,all of them are performing an well choreographed dance,and the ball is the music. They don’t need any tactics or game routines to enjoy the game,they don’t really think of distance as something to harness either. To the boys,it’s inherently obvious that distance is as important as it is inevitable. It’s so important that I call it the most important player of the game,and it’s quite poetic that the most important player is invisible.
The fun part about distance is that it doesn’t limit itself to an hour of evenings fun for the boys,it permeates throughout life, through beauty and terror,the distances between things is where possibility exists,it is where life takes place. Our life is often an imitation of Mathematics, in the heruistics we employ to figure out the optimal distance between things.
In mathematics we have a structure called a metric space and a concept embedded in it called continuity.Imagine the bunch of kids scattered around on the pitch as a metric space and continuity as the continuous flow of the volleyball from one player to another without the ball hitting the ground. As you might have guessed, distance is quintessential to continuity and we have to get it just right,else the ball might hit the ground. Continuity is important in life to preserve the flow of life, but in practice it’s not as neat as Mathematics makes it out to be.
To make the most out of continuity in life, we have to take care of distance between our goals/tasks in our day to day lives. We have to make sure that the distance is large enough that we are making significant progress at a good rate, since our time is finite. To do this optimally, we have to pick up goals that can be broken down into atomic goals, the smaller the goal from your starting position, better are your chances of preserving continuity. Remember that to be continuous over a larger domain, you have to start by being continuous over points that make up the domain.
But, the ball is going to drop sometime, and the beautiful almost organic continuity is going to come to an end. It’s jarring, and aesthetically incongruent to beauty. The play won’t stop there, they’ll pick up the ball and continue,and this is something we can learn in life too. There will always be discontinuities,maybe along several consecutive intervals, and unlike a mathematical function, we don’t have to be isolated in this period, we can take the help of others, to help us pass the valley of discontinuities,to overcome the non-negotiable trial of distance.