I had this theory a few years ago, about life, and I called it the Sine Wave Theorytm. Every one has seen a sine wave, right? The things that appeared mostly on oscilloscopes in the labs back in school when they were explaining Alternating Current, sound waves – shit like that. (As a side note, when I was at electrician college, a friend and I fed Kylie Minogue’s voice through an oscilloscope to see whether her voice had been smoothed by computer… for I should be so lucky it had!)
Well, anyhow – sine waves progress along the x-axis and wander above and below it on the z-axis. So I came up with this theory at some point that we are all sine waves. The x-axis is like life – we progress along it, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but all the time we progress along the x-axis. We’ll most likely meet other sine waves – people who are also traveling along the x-axis during our journey through the years. We’ll be affected in different ways by the different sine waves we meet – some we may travel with for a while, like a relationship, before becoming separate again. Others we may stick with on the same path, while some may send us off in totally new directions – like a turning point in our lives.
It all boiled down to a kind of analogy for life, using sine waves and the effect the different waves had on each other when they “collided” along the way. What’s got me thinking about this again are a couple of things that I’ve read in the last week.
One was at Wil Wheaton‘s site – Wil is the same age as me, give or take a few weeks, and he had an entry in his journal this week that was a lament on his 30 years of existance and the longing for times gone by. He described it as an overwhelming sense of sadness when he thought about the time he appeared to have wasted as a kid. Personally I don’t see time as being wasted – whatever you do with your time at any stage in your life, it always helps shape you in one way or another… but that’s for another entry.