“Mathology: the only sin is stupidity”

By Lumepa Apelu 26 July 2018, 12:00AM

Sometimes when sitting next to learned ones and delving into their learned minds, you wonder. You wonder if they know of the thickness of their own learnedness. 

Whether they can smell a funny smell of old things like books kept in libraries, pest infested, crawling things and all, meant to be worked on from time to time. 

How old those learning things are lurking in there and such grouchiness, I wonder. Who reads everything anyway? 

But I sat next to one recently and by no choice of mine because the room was small. So I suffered through the conversation between himself and others I know, and with peculiar curiosity as I am mostly analytical with my curious mind. 

It is a curse to be overly analytical when you are dealing with loved ones you are supposed to appreciate or even workers of the tourism industry, my close companions today, whom I unfairly analyze with impatience as a result. 

But to be fair to yours truly, I managed to appreciate one such earnest worker yesterday; a gardener with a feistiness and a flaming initiative for pure hard work. Finally! A heartbeat and someone who does not always look at you with the white sides of his eyes rolled up. 

But I digress.

So when the learned ones speak of their beliefs, and in a country like ours where some of us and our beliefs are kept quietly inside our humble dresses and loosely pocketed pants, do we stay frozen for life? 

Or do we speak like we see the world through troubled eyes, to make a deliverance of justice for injustices made upon the poor? 

Can we do that without blinking or will we lose our sleep because we have gone and cursed ourselves like the crawling things in the mighty learned one’s head? 

“I wouldn’t cry for anything,” says a song about a bitter sweet ending between two lovers. 

But we are here. Life and learning is just beginning. Sadly too, only the flexible understand the meaning of humility. 

For bricks do not stretch much and while stones can cry, they are difficult to move. So the learned ones can be a hurdle too. 

But I watched a movie with children, innocent still, and thankfully for them. Young Sheldon, the star of the show, after an independent search for truth about God and religion, fell asleep and dreamt the solution for himself. Upon wakefulness he jumped to his own discovery. 

Said young Sheldon, “ I declare my new religion to be called Math-o-logy. In my religion, the only sin is stupidity.” 

How freeing to be scared of very little besides stupidity. Can you imagine the life of a free man without worry but the fear of calculating the map of the village plantation acres wrong? Can you imagine when we no longer have to deal with the drifting worker who walks into a room to do something as if he is landing on the moon and is surrounded by deja vu? 

How would a day be for you if you saw for no apparent reason that someone out of logic picked up a can of coke to be placed in the rubbish bin, that blotched thing some blessed brains designed to ease off the wreck-less rubbishing of the sea? 

And what about the brilliance of a day to day notice board filled with poetry and song to relax the stifling bureaucracy in the order of 1 2 3 made by colonialists to rule an intelligent race which once thrived in the forest, in the sea, in the middle of the mountains and yes it was a beautiful chaos?

But the paper of our times has made me think of the gift of expression. How wonderful that we have this in spades still, and with freedom. 

Mind you, I always think of the child in favor of my favorite audience whether I am writing poetry, singing out loud, wrecking every tune along the way or telling a story from nothing and ending with ropes like Tarzan just landed on the roof. If the children do not agree or do not understand, or worse, fall asleep, well, I try again to unlearn myself of complexities I collected like dust along the way. 

Besides the children, well, everyone else, yours truly included, is free to revel in their own wrong opinion. Isn’t that thought budding enough for the flexible mind though? God bless you. 

By Lumepa Apelu 26 July 2018, 12:00AM
Samoa Observer

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