Confused Confucius?

When life gets cloudy, we immediately want it to be clear. When math starts to get challenging people decide it isn’t for them. When relationships start to become confusing, people want answers. Is life really that particular that we need answers right away? Are we the cause of all the confusion or is it really that complicated?

I am subject to wanting answers, and wanting them now. Who doesn’t want to know how life is going to end up? Myself, for one. Even though I want answers, why would you wish your life away and spoil the ending? Life is pretty straight-forward in some aspects. There is no surprise ending when dealing with life or death – to live is death, and to die is gain. So why in our lives do we try to muddy up the equation?

When two added to two is four, its simple. Then we want to try to add some spice to the equation and say that the square root of two squared plus two raised to the first power is…still four. Hmm, is that really that confusing? Let’s try it again; we need some more excitement. Let’s say that the sum of e to the natural log of two, plus six raised to the zero power times the cubed root of eight equals…four. Puzzling, right? The only thing that is puzzling is that in each of the situations, we try to make it mean more and be more complicated than it really is, but each time, it comes out to be four.

Now, I’m not saying that life isn’t a fuzzy shade of gray sometimes, but when it comes to the important things in life – life itself, love, truth, meaning – its as clear as day. So in relationships, when things are getting confusing there is no need to try to solve the problem. There are ways of dealing with it to make it less confusing. You could just ask the person what is going on. You could avoid the situation completely, or you could just keep going on, knowing that when it comes to being loved, or loving, you’re already taken care of, this is just an added bonus.

I haven’t quite solved this equation yet, but I think it could be a little bit of everything, and hopefully it still all adds up to four.