The Mathematics of Creation (Or: Why God Probably Needed More Than Seven Days)

My friend's grandmother kept twenty-five identical butter dishes in her kitchen cabinet – a detail I fixated on during the summer of 1982 when my parents shipped me off to suburban Milwaukee for eight weeks of what they called character development but what I secretly suspected was their attempt at a child-free vacation to Reno1. Each morning, Mrs. Abernathy would reach past the newer dishes to grab the oldest – a weathered ceramic piece from 1942, its surface a spiderweb of hairline cracks recording four decades of breakfast-table physics (ceramics, unlike humans, grow more honest with their history rather than learning to hide it). When I asked why she ignored the pristine army of replacements waiting behind it, she adjusted her cat-eye glasses and said, with absolute conviction, "The first one remembers all my mistakes."2

She'd bought it the same day she opened her bakery, back when Milwaukee's Third Ward still smelled more of yeast than yacht clubs – when the very idea of a woman-owned business prompted the kind of patronizing head-shaking usually reserved for children announcing plans to become professional unicorn trainers. It survived dropped plates, rushed mornings, countless Sunday brunches, three economic recessions, and what she called The Great Cake Disaster of 19573. The newer dishes arrived gradually – gifts from well-meaning relatives who assumed the old one needed replacing, each one a silent referendum on the value of imperfection. But she kept using the original, maintaining with evangelical certainty: Butter tasted better served from a dish carrying the weight of history.

I didn't understand then, because how could I? Understanding requires a specific variety of failure-induced wisdom4. Now, at forty-seven, sitting at my desk surrounded by drafts of unfinished work (and, if we're being honest-three separate self-help books all opened to chapters about "embracing imperfection"), I think about those twenty-five butter dishes with uncomfortable frequency.

The Weight of Twenty-Five Attempts

We hold ourselves to impossible standards. We expect brilliance to spring forth fully formed, like Athena from Zeus's forehead, though we conveniently forget Zeus needed Hephaestus to split his skull open first, a detail glossed over in most motivational posters, probably because skull-splitting doesn't translate well to Instagram5.

Creation doesn't crawl forward in single bounds – it stumbles, trips, and occasionally face-plants through twenty-five small steps, each one marginally less embarrassing than the last. Consider the potter at their wheel (or don't – this metaphor works equally well with computer programmers, first-time parents, or anyone who's ever attempted to fold a fitted sheet6). The first bowl emerges lopsided, the second too thick, the third collapses entirely. By the twenty-fifth attempt, their hands know the clay's resistance, understand its willingness to transform. The masterpiece emerges not from divine inspiration but from the accumulated wisdom of twenty-four imperfect attempts – a mathematical progression of failure leading asymptotically toward competence.

Roads Built by Walking (A Brief Digression into Path Dependencies and Breakfast Cereals)

A Chinese writer once observed roads in the countryside materialize not through official planning but through countless footsteps wearing a path into existence7. Progress follows the same principle – it doesn't announce itself with fanfare but reveals itself in retrospect, after two years of silent, steady walking (and here I want to pause to consider how many metaphors for progress involve walking, as though humanity collectively decided bipedal movement was the perfect metaphor for forward motion in all its forms, while ignoring how much of that walking happens in circles).

Mrs. Abernathy's butter dish carried more than butter – it carried the weight of every burned batch of cookies, every fallen soufflé, every recipe she had to remake until it worked (and oh, the irony of failure being the heaviest thing a container can hold). The newer dishes stayed pristine because they never learned from failure, never developed what she called "character marks" but what I've come to recognize as the physical manifestation of persistence8.

The Invisible Architecture of Time

We live in an age of immediate feedback, where algorithms track our every move and assign numerical values to our existence (as though human growth could be quantified with the same metrics we use to measure Twitter engagement – and wouldn't that be convenient, if personal development came with a progress bar and achievement notifications9). Post a photo: instant likes. Send a message: instant reply. Order dinner: watch a tiny car icon crawl across your screen in real-time. This trains us to expect all progress to arrive in neat, predictable packages, preferably with a tracking number and an estimated time of arrival for our personal enlightenment.

But meaningful change operates on a different timescale, one more aligned with geological processes than digital timestamps. Consider the new yoga practitioner who shows up to class three times a week (and here we must acknowledge the peculiar courage it takes to repeatedly do something poorly in public). For months, maybe years, the poses feel awkward, impossible. Then one ordinary Tuesday, they reach down to tie their shoes and realize their body moves with a new fluidity. The change happened so gradually they missed its arrival, like watching a glacier and never seeing it move despite covering miles10.

Love's Continuation (Or: Why Empty Spaces Keep Finding Me)

Growth leaves empty spaces behind – necessary vacancies where old habits and limiting beliefs used to live (and isn't it strange how we mourn the loss of things we worked so hard to outgrow). These gaps can feel uncomfortable, even grief-worthy, marking where love has been: love for who we're becoming, love for the process itself, love for the person who started the journey even though they no longer exist quite the way they used to11.

The empty spaces echo with questions we never thought to ask when we were too full of certainty to wonder (how many versions of ourselves have we left behind in pursuit of improvement, and do they miss us as much as we occasionally miss them). Each gap represents not just what we've lost but what we've chosen to leave behind – a museum of voluntary abandonments, each exhibit carefully curated by time and circumstance.

Mrs. Abernathy's butter dish bore witness to forty years of breakfast conversations, family arguments, celebrations, and quiet morning coffees. Its imperfections mapped a geography of lived experience, each crack a longitude line on the atlas of becoming. The newer dishes offered perfection without context – blank slates without wisdom, like diaries with empty pages claiming to tell a better story than one filled with messy handwriting and honest mistakes12.

Twenty-Five Attempts at Understanding

The twenty-five dishes metaphor works on multiple levels: as a concrete image, as a mathematical proposition about iteration, and as a commentary on our relationship with imperfection. The newer dishes represent our tendency to abandon projects just as they're about to teach us something valuable, our impulse to start fresh rather than learn from the cracks–a pattern so common it might as well be written into our genetic code alongside our ability to forget where we put our keys13.

Understanding arrives not in the pristine attempts but in the broken ones, in the moments when we realize perfection was never the point (a revelation which itself typically takes about twenty-five attempts to truly sink in). Each try builds upon the last, creating a palimpsest of effort, layering effort upon effort, where failure and success become indistinguishable parts of the same process14.

A Note on Weight (And What Happens When We Stop Carrying It)

Mrs. Abernathy died in 1998, still using her first butter dish. She left the other twenty-four to her children, still in their boxes, with a note explaining their significance – a generational thesis on perseverance and the value of accumulated wisdom. Her children (three of them, each successful in that particular way which makes people forget the importance of old butter dishes) sold them at an estate sale three weeks later. Twenty-three dollars each, except for the one they broke while unpacking, which seemed like such a waste at the time but in retrospect feels like the universe's attempt at one final lesson about the relationship between value and fragility15.

Those twenty-four dishes, now scattered across Milwaukee's homes, garage sales and thrift stores, carry a different kind of weight – the weight of misunderstood inheritance, of lessons sold for twenty-three dollars each. But perhaps this too is part of the process, each dish now starting its own journey of collecting cracks and stories, teaching new owners about imperfection and persistence, one chip at a time. Mrs. Abernathy's first butter dish wasn't valuable because it was first–it was valuable because it was the one she chose to keep breaking.