 |
James R Maxlow |
| My Five-Minute Autobiography | |
|
James R Maxlow |
| My Five-Minute Autobiography | |
Flash-forward five years. Jim sat in a small kindergarten room. A large, unknown man asked Jim to arrange a few blocks before him to make them look like the picture. Jim did as he was told, not quite sure of the man's intent. But these were blocks! Jim didn't need to know the reason. Blocks were meant to be arranged. But there was something else. The picture. Looking at the picture, Jim realized how much cooler it was. And there were other pictures shown to him by the unknown man. Many pictures had numbers, too. Numbers were even cooler than pictures, Jim thought.
As Jim traveled from school to school, town to town, leaving friends behind and making new friends at each stop, he learned something else... numbers were cool no matter where he was! They always worked. They always looked the same. They always did what he wanted them to do. He could use them as much or as little as he wanted, whenever he wanted. Whatever Jim felt like he couldn't do, he knew he could always get numbers to work. Nothing else in the world was that constant, that accessible to him.
Jim was always quick to take advantage of the accessibility of numbers. At each new stop, Jim would do his best with numbers, and people would notice, sooner or later. Sometimes Jim didn't like the people who noticed. But sometimes he really liked the people who noticed. They'd ask him to do things that they didn't ask most other kids to do. And he'd do them. Often he didn't know why they wanted the things done, just like he didn't know why the man wanted the blocks arranged. But mostly they seemed happy when he did them, so he did them for that reason. He also did them because it was fun for him, and of course Jim always liked to have fun.
At year sixteen since time froze, Jim learned something else, something bad. Jim learned of a terrible tragedy. Numbers weren't there for lots of other people like they were for him. People around Jim often tried to avoid numbers. People, for whatever reasons, didn't think that they could control numbers like they should be able to. Even worse, some people hated numbers! Impossible! But it was true!
But that's wasn't right, he thought. That wasn't fair. If he could use numbers, everybody should be able to use numbers. They belonged to everyone. Everybody had gone to school, just like Jim did. Jim was sure that everybody had been shown numbers, just like he had been. But now Jim liked numbers, while others didn't. It should have been like ice cream. Even though Jim didn't like chocolate, Jim liked ice cream in general, and vanilla was his favorite. Even though people didn't like some flavors of ice cream, everybody liked ice cream in general, and everybody had their favorite. So, even though there should have been people who didn't like some kinds of numbers, everybody should have liked numbers in general, and everybody should have had their favorite kind of numbers. But it just wasn't working out the way it should.
And over and over and over people told Jim he was good with numbers. And Jim would smile and say, 'Thank you'. But really Jim didn't like that, because mostly it meant that many of the people who were congratulating him never saw how cool numbers were, and never got to thinking that they themselves could do what Jim was doing. In year seventeen, Jim came up with a plan. He would make sure that people would like numbers, and that they would be able to get numbers to do what they wanted. Instead of having other people tell Jim about numbers, Jim himself could do the telling. Instead of just enjoying ice cream, Jim would make the ice cream for other people to enjoy. What a fantastic idea!
In the next few years, Jim began to see that enjoying numbers was very different from getting others to like them, just as enjoying ice cream was very different from making ice cream. But Jim would stick to his plan, no matter how difficult it became. He saw that many others wanted to make numbers popular too, and that he could learn a great deal from those people. He also saw that many people didn't want numbers to become popular, because they wanted other, different things to be popular. Jim didn't mind that too much, because he thought that those people must not have gotten to liking numbers like he did. But it was important, he thought, that everyone be given a chance to really like numbers. That meant that Jim would have to get out into the world and start making ice cream.
And today Jim is standing right there at the edge of the spinning world, almost ready to finally go out and see what he can do to make people like numbers. Spinning, spinning, spinning.