I have a hole in my beard. A bald spot to be precise; located right below what is colloquially known as the “soul patch” and in the center of what should be a pretty solid beard, a little wispy on the sideburns and cheekbones, sure, but a solid beard. I have this bald spot because of a biking/roller-blading/skateboarding/walking-in-a-straight-line-while-being-too-gangly accident that occurred when I was about eleven or twelve. When it happened it didn’t seem out of the ordinary, I got up, my mom washed it out with hydrogen peroxide and I went along with my regularly scheduled programming. My friends probably made fun of me for having a silver-dollar-sized scab on my face, but that was par for my particular adolescent course; had I not fallen (literally) on my face they likely would have found other ammo to use in a (hopefully) friendly rib-fest, e.g. my general nerdiness, an inability to dribble a basketball with even marginal competency, etc., etc. Javen Weston, from about age 10-18 had plenty of character quirks to be exploited by friend and foe alike.

I often bring up this particular bald-spot/scar and the story behind it to people whenever conversations veer into even the most peripheral of topics: my face, my beard, beards in general, scars, hair, the Boston Red Sox, the NHL playoffs, that one line in Billy Madison about Grizzly Adams, etc. I do this because it’s on my face, and even though we are told in school that looks don’t matter (a statement I agree with, in principle) our faces do matter. They travel with us always, we cannot escape them with the uncountable number of reflective surfaces strewn about the modern landscape. We may say that our looks are not important to us, but when almost all of us have to look at our own faces at some point of every single day that we are alive, it is hard for me to believe that our reflections don’t matter at least just a little bit. And I always notice this scar. I don’t notice it because it reminds of a painful experience from childhood because I cannot recall the specifics of the incident any more than I can recall a any particular instance of the near-infinite number of times I have stubbed my big toe. I don’t notice it because I remember the ridicule of friends or classmates, I have plenty of those memories and this one is nowhere even close to getting on my Mount Rushmore of Embarrassing Life Experiences. I notice this scar because I didn’t even know it was there until I reached facial-hair-growing age. The wound healed up perfectly after the scab fell off you couldn’t even tell it was there. But once I reached an age where I could no longer count the number of hairs on my chin in under 2 minutes, there it was, like the patch of bare ground surrounding a big oak tree. I notice this scar because it’s more than just a scar to me, it’s a constant reminder about all of the experiences of my childhood that fundamentally molded who I am, but didn’t make their true nature known until I was (at least) far into my twenties; a reminder of the countless other events that I won’t appreciate until my thirties, forties, fifties,…and the ones that I will never appreciate because they have been lost forever from my memory’s grasp. And I look at a metaphorical representation of that loss every morning.   

Biography

Ariel Sharon died last week. After spending a long period of time in a coma, he finally passed. I have to admit that before a few years ago, I didn't have a very complex idea of who Sharon was, what he had done, etc.; and, to a certain extent, I think that helped me come to know him as the complex individual he (and the rest of us) was/are/can be in both our minute daily lives and when looked at as the sum of the area under the curve of our life's path; the integral of the arc our lives have followed. In math, (calculus, to be exact) one of the simplest ways to estimate the area under any line drawn on a piece of paper is to split that curve up into a few sections, like this:

Then, we draw the blue rectangles, calculate the area of each of them (length x width), add those areas together and BOOM!!, we've approximated the area under the curve from a to b. Of course, this is a really poor approximation; just look at all the blue sticking up above the curve, and the white sitting below it for evidence. 

We can make this same kind of approximation if we imagine Ariel Sharon's life as a line/path that has moved through time, geography, culture, politics,..... If we wanted to find a rough approximation of who Sharon was, we can split his life up into a few different chunks, say pre-Prime Ministership and post-PM election, then average the "type" of man he was in those two time periods, add them together and BOOM!! we've approximated Ariel Sharon. But, damn is it a crude approximation. The man is elected Prime Minister of Israel and instantly becomes a different "type" of man than he was before that instant. It seems ridiculous because it is, but in calculus we have a very simple way to remedy thiss problem; we split the curve up into smaller and smaller rectangles, like this:

If we add up all of those rectangle/chunks of Sharon's life, we get a much better answer to the questions 'what is the area under the curve?' or 'Who was Ariel Sharon?' than we did before. but, it's still not perfect, in math we use a brilliant technique invented by Gottfried Leibniz to 'integrate' the curve by splitting it up into infinitely many little rectangles. But, doing so with the sum of a person's life experiences is impossible; in effect, we would have to re-live Sharon's life, and each of us can only live our own lives, and certainly could not re-live Sharon's without bringing our own histories with us for the ride. All we can do is inspect the lives of those around us in as much detail as we can, and keep in mind that calculating the sum of a person's character based on a limited number of 'data points' or 'personal interactions' is a sure way to mis-judge that person. All of us understand how complex our own lives are/have been, and going forward we need to keep in mind that no matter how hard we try, or closely we look, we can never see all of the area under the twisted curve of another person's path through life.