The vibrant, young faces of the students glowed slightly under the fluorescent lighting of the seminar room. Lulls of chatter filled the room with an air of expectation. By request of the tutor, the room became silent and it was time to begin practicing working with vectors. After leaving class, I stumbled across this metaphor while walking home; my mind was consumed by a variety of thoughts.
Each vector is like an arrow. It has a specific magnitude and direction: a command for how far it should go and in what way. Like a vector, we all have our magnitude and direction. We each have a goal, a desire, a dream that we want to achieve in life. We all want a purpose; that’s our direction. Our magnitude is how far we are willing to go to complete our goals. It’s also the momentum that we gain as we work longer. If our dreams are really ambitious, we’ll need a larger magnitude to get there. Magnitude and direction. Pursuit and a purpose.
However, there’s a different kind of vector: the zero vector. Essentially, the zero vector is just a dot, with no magnitude, no particular direction. It’s perfectly okay to be like a zero vector. Zero vectors are nice. Zero vectors are necessary. We don’t always need to have a magnitude or a specified direction. The zero vector might sound boring, but the beautiful thing about the zero vector is that, rather than point in no direction, the zero vector points in every direction. Being the zero vector means you have the ability to point anywhere you want, and then create your magnitude. An infinite number of possibilities, and all you have to do is start.
We all have to figure out the proper timing if it’s right for us to become either kind of vector. Still, I think it’s important to start moving in some direction, rather than being stagnant indefinitely. Just a few months ago, I was a zero vector. I had lots of different options of what I wanted to do for the next few years, but I felt stuck not knowing which one was the right choice. All I had to do was choose, to start creating my magnitude, but it paralysed me for weeks. Then, I decided. That was the choice I made, and this is now the path I am on.
Often, that direction you’ve chosen might feel like the right one, but it’s good to go back to being a zero vector in order to reset. Stopping short of the end when it feels like it’s the wrong direction is how we learn what we want and is certainly not a failure. Then, after some time, we begin in a new direction. Eventually, we’ll get somewhere. And, if you follow through with what you think is right, you’ll end up where you want to be.
Sitting on a wooden park bench along the main university avenue, I wonder what the sum of all my vectors—my end destination—might be. I’m not sure what it is and I don’t think I’m supposed to, but it feels like the vector I’m following now is pointing in the right direction. Now, on a pleasant day such as this, partly cloudy with a breeze whispering over the manicured lawns, the old sandstone buildings invite me to sit down and think and write.
This was a different kind of article from others I’ve written in the past, like An Icy, Apocalyptic Story: Svalbard or The Largest Organism on the Planet. If you liked this one, let me know. Also, if my writing sounds like I’ve got everything figured out, I certainly do not.