Some Thing's School Didn't Teach Me

It is not a world of black and white, but gray. There are very few right answers. Sure, when the test is given, the capital of Turkey may be Ankara but give it a couple of years or even weeks, and it's not Ankara it's Istanbul (not Constantinople). There are very few right answers in school, and outside school there are even less. Even so, the arranging of a or x or y from one side of the equals sign to the other will stay curled up in my brain somewhere, coming out randomly to s t r e t c h when something comes perfectly together, like the first bite of a cookie fresh out of the oven, or seeing my son fall into the zone, delivered by a book and I find it as hard to get his attention as if there actually was an entire atmosphere between us.

Probability can help me pass the test, but school didn't teach me life has its own answers. I know how to pronounce cos, sin and tan, while cheerfully having no idea anymore of how they relate to anything. I can't get all the questions right. Often I have no idea what the question actually IS, or who is going to teach me whatever it is I should be learning. It can be a long, painful fall from being a straight A student to just an ordinary human living the life I've been given, the life I'm trying to build and figure out.

There are very few right answers. Life's algebra doesn't balance. But there have been moments when I understand a person, a sunrise, or a recipe and the entire sky has changed color and my heart sang in celebration. There have been disappointments that fell far into the abyss inside me, and gray was the only color I could see in any of it. But it was those moments - of heartbreak and clarity and Saturday's 'Super Moon' and the sudden smell of cinnamon - that have become part of my own answers, to the questions I had been looking for all along.