Timelines

I sent this to my wife last year on the 6-year anniversary of the day we met. Yes, it's a love letter involving graphs and mathematical concepts. Remember, I am an engineer.

My Lady,

Most of the time, life continues along a trajectory that is not terribly surprising. At least, that's how we imagine it when projecting the current course of events into the future. There is little that is surprising here.



Of course, in practice, things are more complicated - particularly in life. There are ups and down, setbacks and breakthroughs. As we encounter new experiences and people, they add to our lives, altering our course - but not fundamentally changing it. They would be represented by the inflection point on the graph below, indicating the gradual effect of some new influence. While not specifically foreseen, these effects are not entirely unpredictable or surprising.



But on rare occasions, something so utterly new enters that it fundamentally changes everything. The result is a discontinuity like that below, indicating a sharp difference between things before and after. There is no way that such a change could be projected from what came before, regardless of the assumptions involved. Such a phenomenon in any system would indicate that someone outside of - and greater than - the system personally and deliberately intervened in it; in life, it points to Divine Intervention.



For me, that discontinuity happened on August 27, 2006. My life has been unimaginably more beautiful, rich, full, loving, joyful, adventuresome, meaningful, and God-haunted ever since.

Love,
your Sir