Technically, above you have a collection of pentagons. But if I surveyed 30 people and asked them what they saw, nobody would say that. Because this, for all intents and purposes, is a soccer ball.
This habit of the human mind -- to connect the dots and see the bigger picture, even when one doesn't inherently exist -- is known as Gestalt Theory in psychology. It's because floating pieces of information don't sit well with us; we need to figure it out, and put the puzzle pieces together until something we can understand emerges. It bothers us to think about the pentagons above being...just that. We need them to be a soccer ball, otherwise what are they there for?
I think about this a lot, even more now that all my lasts are lining up. I took this dumb math competition for the last time this week, then spent the rest of the night in the strangest melancholia -- mostly because I've done this for thirteen years, and I'm not really sure if it was a waste of my childhood yet. I found myself believing that if I could somehow incorporate this into my future, make it an instrumental part of the narrative, make it the opening scene of the biopic they'll never make about me, then it couldn't possibly be a waste. I talked to a friend about this --
-- and then I fell into the trap of doing this for everything I've ever loved: Maybe I could triple major and dual minor and then simultaneously attend all four of my dream schools and then I won't be missing anything ever. My mother always accuses me of "moving the goalpost on myself" -- meaning, to quote Lin Manuel Miranda, I'm never satisfied. But that's not really true; my goals are quite clear: I want this narrative arc to be clean, and clear, and obvious. I want everything to be for something, to have some kind of purpose.
Basically, when you splatter my life on a page, I want to see a soccer ball, and not six pentagons.
But...that's not really how life works, is it? Sometimes, my experiences are just pentagons, or even just white space. Sometimes it makes no sense, has no structure, can't be sketched out by Kurt Vonnegut on a chalkboard. If these memories never make it to the biopic or memoir, maybe I should learn to be okay with that.
And maybe I should find another favorite pastime...
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