Numbers: A Love Story

I just got back from my yearly Dead Poet's Retreat.  Sooo good.  In an email preceding the retreat, we were encouraged to watch this:

Embrace the Shake

It's a Ted Talk where the speaker explains that embracing limitations helped open up his creativity.  Very cool and worth watching.

While on the retreat, we had a writing session - you go off and write whatever you want, be it poetry or a story or stream-of-consciousness.  But I wasn't feeling the creativity flow.  Afterwards, I was thinking about this video, and wondering how I could give myself a limitation to possibly spark my creativity.  And here's what I came up with.  What if I had to write a story using only numbers?

Well, that seems impossible, at first.  I quickly decided that common math symbols were also fair game.  And then a story came into focus.  I spend the next 45 minutes writing it in my head.  And I spoke it aloud that night at the big anything-goes bonfire.  I'm sure it's not the most amazing thing ever written, but I'm pretty pleased with it, especially because it was the creative burst I needed.  And, bizarrely, it truly does move me.  I think it's better heard than read, but here it is:

Numbers: A Love Story

1+1=2

1x1=3

3=1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
  10
  11
  12
  13
  14
  15
  16
  17
  18

18=1

1 .... 1 .... 1

1 ... +1?

1+1!

1+1 .... 1+1 .... 1+1

1 ... > ...1

1-1

1 .... 1 .... 1

1 ... +1?

1+1 .... 1+1 .... 1+1

1 ... x1 ...

1x1, 1x1, 1x1

1 < 1

1-1

1x1

1-1 ... 1x1 ... 1-1 ... 1x1 ...

1-1

1 ... / (divided by)

<1 .... <1 .... <1

1 .... 1 .... 1

1 ... + .... 1?

1+1 .... 1+1 .... 1+1

1+1=2

2 .... 2 .... 2

1x1=3