Symmetry and Sleeplessness

"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

The sidewalk of Kilgore campus between math and history classes at 9:57 a.m. is, perhaps, a strange place for William Blake's words to be running through my mind, but then, I have had stranger thoughts coming out of math class.

This image at least didn't feature my instructor with a lasso. Instead, I was still dwelling on that beautiful little graph on the board that nearly moved me to tears. It was an inverse reciprocal function, just two gently curving pieces opposite each other and a few points away, an identical set. And a straight slant ran through them, slicing them cleanly in half diagonally.

When I saw it sitting there, complete, a little bit of peace diffused into my brain. It was a gentle whisper, a quiet reminder that in one small corner of one small classroom in one small town in the not-as-big-as-they-think-it-is-state of Texas, "all is right with the world." Ahh.

As for tears, perhaps they are a bit much. They didn't actually fall out of my eyes. I was still in shock over making a 99 on that math test, which is, as you may already realize, a miracle worth crying about. And, more than anything, I was tired.

Although I never planned it this way, the sun had arrived just in time that morning to rouse me from a two hour nap-- not a normal occurrence! There were a lot of factors to my sleeplessness. Possibly a certain feline who shall remain nameless, or a certain sore hip, or a certain delectable cup of coffee. But in the end, it worked out for the best.

It's a mysterious truth, but one that is becoming more and more evident to me, that God sometimes goes to unreasonable lengths to keep us up at night because he likes to be with exhausted, slightly cranky people who are helpless to change their vulnerable state.

And as for me, I find that the more wide awake hours I spend, the more wide eyed I become to God, and the more thankful I am for the small beauties and privileges in life; asymptotes, for instance. Or naps.