Boundless in Blue Chiffon: A New Equation


I heard her before I saw her. Everyone in the airport heard her, but once they saw her, I'm sure the image was burned in their brains for all eternity. 

"Tracyyyyyyyyyy!" she sang out in her ear-splitting soprano. "I seeeeeeee youuuuuuu!" She was wearing a blue chiffon vintage bridesmaid dress that had seen better days. She often shopped the goodwill racks just so that she could wow me when she met my flight in the Phoenix airport. It was her idea of a practical joke. Every head turned to watch her as she floated through the baggage area like a blue cotton candy cloud. 

"Traccccyyyyyyyy! I missed youuuuuu!"

Meet my friend Anne. 

In my last post, I talked about an aging equation, and I imagined my crazy math teacher self asking my students to solve it with a model. Well, Anne is one of my mathematical models. 

If you asked me to describe Anne, there are many, many words that come to mind: Loud, boisterous, eccentric, neon, stubborn, naked moonlight hiker, storyteller, frustrated musician, truculent artist, sangria swiller...these are just a few. When she was struggling through her divorce and managing child-rearing terrors as a newly single parent, she came home one day and took a hammer to her ugly kitchen floor. She removed all of the outdated tile, graphed a swirling design of vortexes and lizards (she lives in the southwest), rented a tile cutter and went to work. A month later, she had a new kitchen floor. The stressors were still there, but she had proven something to herself as she faced them. She overcame her limitations of the moment by focusing on what she could control. She could control her kitchen floor, and in doing so, she reclaimed her sense of boundlessness.

She has hiked the Grand Canyon as a sixty-something woman, explored Europe, South America, northern Africa, Canada, and odd corners of the United States. And while I sound a bit envious (I am), I admire her spirit. It seems that she has changed the aging equation of Whiskers + Bifocals + Invisibility = Old Age. 

Don't misunderstand me. She has whiskers like all of us. She definitely has bifocals. When she reads, she practically kisses the book because her eyesight is so poor. And no, Anne is not a 25 year old hottie-pa-tottie. To many, she might be invisible, although she struts her own version of a red hat by way of blue chiffon dresses, hoop earrings, and silk scarves and outfits she has collected on her trips.

But I call Anne my mathematical model for boundlessness because she has changed the equation. She has let go of the whiskers, the bifocals, the invisibility; she has changed the addends, and in doing so, has changed the sum. It doesn't mean they don't exist, but they aren't part of her equation. What's that quote?
Stop giving energy to the things you don't want.
                                                                              -Wayne W. Dyer

Anne has redirected her energy. She always was the better math teacher. Maybe, boundlessness is about how we direct our energy. I like that idea, and so my new equation could be:

             (Focus + Energy) = Boundlessness

As long as I don't have to wear blue chiffon, I think I can try. 




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