magistrate

I have this memory from when I was a much younger magi. It was some school night, and my brother – two years older than me – was working through some math homework; probably very early algebra. I was curious and bounded over to see, and the problem was something very simple like a + 5 = 13, asking to solve for a.

I, with the assurance of an intelligent child who had not yet learned that being confidently wrong feels exactly like being correct, said "Oh, I know this! a is the first letter of the alphabet, so it has to be 1. So a plus 5... wait, that doesn't work!"

Either my mother or my brother then explained to me the concept of variables.

I immediately went "But if it can mean anything, then you never know anything!"

I was a child.

Later on, algebra turned out to be a subject I really enjoyed. It was just all puzzles! And calculus was also great, because it was just all advanced puzzles! (Geometry, I hated. It was just all proofs. But that's neither here nor there.) I don't remember the moment when that absolute incomprehension turned into clarity, but there had to have been n>0 of those moments somewhere.

I feel like I'm having a similar experience with Buddhist philosophy, of all things, right now.

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