The ethics of 10/10/10 and other numbers

And so it begins.  I write. I think. I opine. The ingredients for a blog.  I also fear, which is why it has taken me so long to launch. I fear negativity, as I’m rather thin skinned.  Fear is a frequent visitor in my life, it doesn’t stick around for long.

My burning platform, to begin the blog, was the auspicious date of 10/10/10. Why? Well, a number of reasons, the first of which is my fascination with numbers.  I’ve always had a kinship with numbers, always looking for a mystical connection of disparate parts through the glue of numbers. My favorites are 7 and 9.  Odd, like me.  My birthday, which I love, is a study in evenness, 2/24.  The ying and yang of odd and even are as good a definition of me as anything.  I bought a lovely cottage with the address of “9996” and learned, at closing, that the actual address was “6669″.  “Sorry,” says I to the realtor, “No can do. The sign of the devil.” She told me to get over it and sign the papers.  I did.  I lost the house in a flood two months later, after having a hen party on 6/6/06 as an act of defiance. Yikes.

It turns out, I believe, that I am not alone.  There is a universal obsession with numbers- dates equalize us. December 7 ~ 9/11~ Y2K~ 12/25~ 01/01~ our birthday’s~anniversaries~the death of a parent~ the birth of a child.  Numbers distill the most complex emotions and situations into a few characters.  I cannot think of a more simple and elegant vector of monumental moments. It is rather beautiful- regardless of race, gender, age, sexual persuasion, education, W2 (hah!), we are bound by the power of numbers.  Ironically, most of us are not fans of math but we love our numbers.

A dear friend and I sat in a New York diner, December 2008 (I don’t remember the exact date).  She had set out to achieve a goal, which would consummate on 10/10/10. We napkined our way through a marathon strategy session in which we identified the component parts of her successful completion of the goal.  The goal involves matters of the heart, so the calculus of her control over the matter nets to zip, nada, nothing. Turns out that the goal was not achieved but I say, “let’s go for 11/11/11″ and I’ll join her in the pursuit of the goal.  And if for some odd (a-hem) reason, 11/11/11 is a miss, we’ll go for 12/12/12 (the date that my son believes the world is going to end).  And if we miss yet again, I assure you that I’ll contrive a powerful combination of dates, times numbers that involve a series of 13’s. Good Lord, that’s almost more delicious than three 6’s.

So what does all of this have to do with ethics?  More than you may imagine.  The ethics of life is a cloudy, murky business. Your right is my wrong and  it plays the other way.  We like numbers because they are a fact, morally agonistic (i.e. 9/11/ is celebrated by Al-Qaeda and vilified by the West), and relatively universal.  The aspiration of this blog is to wade into the weeds of our everyday, kitchen table ethics and distill the most vexing of issues to  1+1=2.