I know this is a ‘Maths’ blog, but if there’s anything reading about the history of mathematicians has taught me, it’s that they engaged in a lot of philosophical thought1. So me ranting about things that aren’t strictly maths is, I’d say, quite justified (not that I had to justify this anyway).
As a disclaimer, I’m not a professional in any of this, so the thoughts below are just that– thoughts. Having said that, I don’t think it hurts to share personal experience; you never quite know the impact it has.
The phrase in quotes in the title of this post is borrowed2 from one of my teachers at sixth form. I remember it vividly because in the aftermath of sitting my A-Level Pure and Stats exam (which I’ve finally accepted went okay, or as okay as it could’ve been at the time), I found myself in a classroom unable to process any of it. At some point that afternoon I ended up outside my CompSci teacher’s office, not really knowing why3. He handed me a 3D printed spiral cylindrical ‘thing’4, and I just stood there fidgeting with it. That’s where I first heard the phrase; the “focus on feeling the feeling“, that mindfulness of just letting whatever’s there be there. I still have the spiral on my desk, and looking at it still takes me back to that moment of grounding presence.
I struggle with responding to results. Exam results, mostly, but really most things that ‘matter’ in any objective sense. There’s this pressure to feel a certain way, to have a reaction that fits the occasion, and when I don’t, or can’t, the freeze sets in. It’s not really nothing, though. It’s more like something is there but you can’t get to it, or won’t. There’s a kind of logic to it, even if it’s not a conscious one. If you don’t let yourself feel it, maybe you don’t have to deal with what it unlocks. And it works, sort of, in the short term. Except I’ve found that the feeling doesn’t go anywhere; it just gets more buried, further down, harder to reach the next time.
Part of what makes it hard is that there’s a script. When something important happens, there’s a way you’re expected to respond, something that at least makes sense to the people around you. And when you can’t access that, there’s this pressure to perform one anyway; to match the room and give people something recognisable. And the harder you look for the feeling, the further away it gets. So you say something that sounds right, or arrange your face into something appropriate and then later you wonder why you feel so disconnected from your own experience.
Something I’m trying to do is just to experience that feeling. Not describe it, or explain it5, or work out what it means; just let it be there. And that includes the nothing. Because nothing has a texture to it. Perhaps it’s the silence that tells you something is on the other side of a door you’ve decided not to open. So when I say I feel nothing, I think I’m already feeling something; the weight of it, the silence of it, and I’m slowly learning that’s allowed to count too.
The thing about ‘just let it be there’ is that it sounds like the simplest instruction in the world, and it might be the hardest one. Because letting it be there means resisting every external signal telling you to feel something else, or to feel faster, or to feel more legibly. It means sitting with something that has no shape yet and trusting that’s okay.
I don’t always manage it. Most of the time I don’t. And I’m not providing a resolution for any of this because I had one, I doubt I’d still be in it.
- Some of my recent reading has included ‘A History of Pi‘ by Petr Beckmann, and Euler’s Gem by David Richeson ↩︎
- As many of my coping mechanisms are, from people wiser than me ↩︎
- Looking back, I believe I know exactly why… I was too scared to approach any of my maths teacher because of the ‘fear of letting them down’. ↩︎
- You can find similar 3D printed spiral fidget ‘things’ here ↩︎
- One might notice some irony here; in writing about and describing a feeling, am I truly letting myself feel it? The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.. ↩︎
