day fifty-five - five — kilt life crisis

My brain isn’t very good at stopping still for too long (sadly though, the body is a different story). If it’s not occupied with what I’m doing at the present time or what’s on the plate for the next course, it’s churning with anything from ideas, memories, aspirations, to patterns, numbers and the worst puns imaginable - all this accompanied with constant music. That’s a good day… one without depression or anxiety.

One thing that I’ve always done, is play with numbers in my head. Maths games in the car on journeys as a child, counting in sequences, finding patterns in numbers around me. I find that this distraction can help to quell the other negative thoughts that can be swirling around my head.

A math heavy children’s show called Peg + Cat (which has ridiculously good music), has the main character counting backwards from five to calm down. It’s a common strategy, but for me, doesn’t occupy enough of my brain to be all that effective.

One of my great mates is a beautiful human, and an incredible mathematician (amongst many other talents), He has a thing for five (and to be fair, five is pretty awesome). One day he mentioned that for every minute of the day, there is a way of manipulating the numbers of the time to become a multiple of 5. With the four digits, you can group digits together, and use any arithmetic function, but can’t change the order.

So 3:20am could be 3+2=5 5+0=5 or 12:52pm could be 12x5=60 60÷2=30. 21:24 in 24 hour time could be simply 2+1+2x4=20.

It’s silly, and doesn’t have much practical use in daily life, but it’s a brief few seconds where my brain can crunch the numbers and not be thinking about other things… and for a nerd like me, it’s tremendous fun!

Sometimes, it’s not about the specific thing, but the effect that the strategy has on you.

Kilt of the Day - Black Watch Tartan

Five Soundtracks of the day -

Erotic Cakes (Guthrie Govan) - Fives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejNnJrUwBwg

Take 5 - Dave Brubeck Quartet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHdU5sHigYQ

five-five-FIVE - Frank Zappa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hAG_aU1Dww

River Man - Nick Drake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ9JBwuO128

Mission: Impossible - Lalo Schifrin - Münchner Rundfunkorchester feat. James Morrison