Infinity at the Dude Ranch

This is the symbol for infinity, a concept that gives me a headache and makes me feel privileged to be part of the universe. Even at its most routine and mundane, daily life takes place in this astonishing place that must go on forever, else there would be an outer edge with nothing beyond it. (Ow. Headache.) Infinity doesn’t induce headaches in mathematicians, though. Math, for all its rigor and precision, very comfortably accommodates infinity. There are infinities everywhere in math.  An infinite collection of numbers exist between 0 and 1, for example. Also, you can do a calculation and get a result that goes to infinity but you can still know the quantity well enough to engineer a bridge based on that calculation.

When I look at the symbol for infinity I think, what goes around comes around.  I think of the mobius strip. I dwell on karma. So many westerners including me wield the concept of karma as revenge.  You’ll get what you deserve. Lately I’ve been attempting to exercise my very under-used sense of compassion. From this effort I realize that karma, viewed from the perspective of compassion, takes on a very different meaning. We are all in this together. You must face your karma just as I must face mine.

This symbol also suggests the Lazy 8 Dude Ranch. When I was a kid my parents took me on a Dude Ranch vacation. So mortifying. I couldn’t control my damn horse. It kept taking me back to the barn. (I never got the horse appreciation thing.) Recalling this, I speculate that perhaps memory loss increases with age because our brains become cluttered with pointless recollections like my dude ranch horse.  And of course, with TV theme songs from the ’60s.

This post topic comes from The Daily Prompt.