I’ve been thinking a lot about patterns. When I was growing up, my mom sewed all the time. She made the majority of our clothes, including my dad’s suits at one point (and one wincingly memorable plaid “leisure suit”). To make something she’d look for a pattern, and if I wondered why she didn’t just make something up, she’d say that wasn’t how she did things.
I began to see that lives followed patterns as well. People went to college, then got married, then had kids. Or skipped college, got married and had kids. The lesson I absorbed was that people picked their pattern and lived their lives accordingly. Sometimes people disrupted the calm, having a child before marriage or getting married before graduating, but largely they corrected course as quickly as possible, so as not to cause further alarm.
When I went to college, I studied history and continued to see patterns everywhere, in governments, society, and the rise and fall of civilizations. While the chaos of the 60’s and 70’s rent the patterns, the 80’s taped them together and on we went.
Except that my life never followed the accepted patterns. I still can’t believe how hard I tried to make myself fit. Anywhere. Anyhow.
When I was 38 my daughter was born. Life changes on a dime if you let it. Of course a baby requires that you stop and really examine your life. And in that time, by chance, I met Amy Kellogg. She was a most profound disruption of my familiar. Amy had crossed the Mediterranean in a tramp steamer. She could make you a pair of shoes, whittle you a spoon, bake you a cake (no recipe needed), or recommend the best book about the Bloomsbury group. She was something of an anarchist but adored Queen Victoria. We worked and talked and learned. Me doing most of the learning. I began to see, through her and tales of her most exotic and accomplished family, that I’d been staring at life through the wrong lens. I saw clearly that I needed to design my own life pattern, one with broad outlines and allowances for chaos in the details. When it came to life, Amy was like that teacher when you were a kid that made long division suddenly simple.
I later went back to school, thinking I’d be a history teacher. I took a math class, so as not to embarrass myself when my daughter asked for help. I loved it so much my plan went out the window and I decided to focus on it completely. Any fears I had of starting from scratch, in math no less, were assuaged by Amy and her brother Verne, among lovely others. They thought I could do anything, and somehow they made me believe it too.
Then Verne died, and later Amy. The people who love them miss them. Amy never really got to take a big deep breath, untether herself, and just create. And that’s why the Amy Kellogg Memorial Residency is so important to all of us. It’s a legacy of time and space, for small projects and big ideas and everything in between. Amy would love it, so check out the button below.
I’m a math teacher. I know that mathematicians and scientists look for patterns, beautiful and elegant. They’re vital to our understanding of the world around us and in us. But they know as well that life also depends on chaos, gorgeous and unquantifiable chaos.
Now I try to live according to my own pattern. It allows for chaos. And it suits me. What suits you?