Too many years ago now to count, I once calculated my personal “magic number.” It was pretty stupid: all I did was gather my birthdate, my phone number, my address, my ZIP code, my Social Security Number — any numbers I could think of which applied to me — and added up all their digits. Then I added up all the digits in the result, and so on, boiling it down, until I’d reduced the whole mess to a single digit. The result: 6.
I don’t remember why I did this. (Note hidden, unsupported assumption that I in fact had a reason. Surely not because I thought I could somehow use the result to improve my life?!?)
And it was, as I said, pretty stupid. No matter what else I hoped to achieve — even assuming any vaguely touchy-feely mystical validity to the exercise — who among us knows or can even find out all the meaningful numbers in his/her life? If I’d used the digits in the current time, for instance, as soon as I wrote them down (using a twelve- or twenty-four-hour clock? and in which time zone?) they’d be wrong. At that point in my life, I had both a motorcycle and a car: why not include their odometer readings, and/or their engine displacements? (But, hmm, the motorcycle’s was expressed in cubic centimeters; the car’s, in cubic inches…) Et cetera.
So I was pretty obviously confused on the whole magic-number thing. I could’ve simplified the whole project immeasurably if I’d just stopped at my birthday.
