Whimsical Question #2

Q: Is life a circle or a line?

Just watch The Lion King. See? Many people call it the Circle of Life. And anyone who was in Girl Scouts (or took math at any level in school) knows about how a circle has no beginning and has no end (and that's how long you'll be my friend...or something along those lines...speaking of lines...). So does a line! What we think of as lines are really line segments. A line actually has no end points. It is infinite. A perfect circle and a line just like infinity are concepts. They are abstract. (I'm sorry, but if someone really could draw a perfect circle, totally hypothesizing here of course, he or she would have had to start drawing the circle at a point. A point is a beginning or an end or just a point.) It seems very popular to compare life to a circle, but there's also time lines ("life line" seems to have taken on a whole other meaning, thanks to a certain game show). But you know, the song "History Repeating" just suddenly popped in my head, so are we on a loop? There are many functions that are infinite, not just straight lines. So are we on a wavy line? Who is to say even your life is infinite? Maybe our own individual lives are not part of the great Circle (or Line...or Wavy Line...) of Life. Maybe they are merely line segments. Or perhaps you are just a dot. After all, in the immortal words of Yakko, Wakko, and Dot (oh, Dot! I totally didn't do that on purpose), "It's a great big universe, and we're all really puny. We're just tiny little specks about the size of Mickey Rooney." So wise, children. So wise.

Edit: I realized I wrote, "Who is to say even your life is infinite?" When I talk about life in that sense, I guess I was talking about your soul/spirit/whatever. Obviously, you will die.

Boy, that sounded like a threat.

It was.





But not from me.