YOU’LL NEVER USE TRIGONOMETRY AGAIN

WEEK OF 12/23/24

 

Let’s jump into the Way-Back machine and sit at our old desk in high school Geometry class.  The teacher is going on and on about sines, cosines, and tangents.

We’ve all heard it – heck, we’ve probably all said it. 

Somebody (maybe you?) raises their hand: “Yo Teach, we’re never gonna use this in real life.  This is a waste of time.”

Sound familiar?

It’s easy to say something isn’t important if we aren’t going to be interfacing with it on a daily basis.  But that attitude completely neglects the developmental benefits that learning, and exercising that knowledge, bestows.

Something doesn’t necessarily need to be used by you to be useful for you.

Interestingly, we never take this attitude with more mainstream fitness ideas.  For example:

Do you deadlift more than 200 pounds?  When are you ever going to lift something more than 200 pounds without help?  And yet, we see the value in getting stronger.

Do you run a few miles a day?  When will you ever really need to run that far?  We realize it’s not about covering the distance, but about improving our cardiovascular health among many other things.

Do you practice hand to hand combat?  When are you ever going to square up with someone on the street and actually throw with intention?  It’s not about actually fighting other people, it’s about developing the confidence and peace of mind not to.

For many things, we may not need them on a daily basis, but we appreciate what they can do for us in indirect ways.

But what about the other things in life?  The ones we dismiss?  Those difficult things that we’d rather not do, so we justify it by staying ignorant to their value?

It’s not that the value isn’t there; it is.  It’s that we don’t see it.

Too often we try to constrain reality into the boundaries of our own beliefs and limited experience, rather than expand ourselves into the boundless possibility of what is.

As we approach the new year, and begin to reflect on the new cycle that lies before us, perhaps we should ask ourselves what things are we currently dismissing because we lack the experience or wisdom with which to see their value?  Sometimes these things are right there, in plain sight.

Although we may never use these things directly, that does not mean that they are not useful for us, or the ones around us.