One of my pastimes in class is to pick up a phrase from what the professor’s saying and take it on a nice long stroll. While we amble, time moves by leaps and bounds and when I come back, I have no choice but to continue daydreaming, because the lecture does not make sense any more.
I am taking a really interesting course this quarter: Analysis and control of nonlinear systems. It’s a course that provides ample food for thought. It is both mathematical and allegorical. A large part of this course is devoted to a form of control that switches between two states, more interestingly known as bang-bang control.
My favourite line from my SoP to Stanford went something like this: In a world where equations are hardly ever linear, one certainly cannot expect lives to be. Yes, life in all its nonlinearity lends itself to some bang-bang control of a different kind.
Bang bang. Sex and violence.
In more elegant terms, love and fear.
Love and fear are the only driving forces in life. All human needs would probably fall into one of the two buckets (and just when I thought that the consultant in me had died…): food, sex, gossip, politics, art, careers, shoes, travel, sex. (Except my apoplectic abomination of pigeons. Now that is a tricky one)
Yes, when stripped of costumes and make-up, every impulse turns out to be one of the two stage veterans. If all the world’s a stage, Love and Fear are shaping the story, controlling almost all human actions.
But surely life cannot be as simple as a primitive control technique. Life, unlike thermostats, is dual not binary. Can love and fear ever exist independent of the other? They feed on one another, slaking and stoking at once. Isn’t love also the fear of loss, isn’t fear the loss of love?
However, behind this curtain of interwoven impulses, one can tell that the best decisions are the ones fueled only by love, and the safest are the ones driven by fear.
So what drives you?
And what holds you back?
