Math+Life #6: Hope- Imaginary or Real?

Hope visits me sometimes,

When I am sleeping,

She comes and smiles at me,

It makes me smile too,

Hope makes me believe that it’s not fake,

That it can still work out,

That I still have her beside me.

 

But then I wake up,

And I see Truth in front of me,

He is ugly and mean,

But I see him every morning,

Truth is always there to greet me in the morning,

He tells me how my dreams will never come true,

He tells me that it’s all fake,

He tells me it won’t work out,

Worst of all, he tells me Hope is never coming back.

 

Truth is real,

Everyone sees him everyday,

They talk to him everyday,

He pretends to simplify my problems,

But really he is holding on to them,

And he’ll let go at the worst times,

After a long day I spend with Truth,

I go back to bed convinced that Hope was fake too.

 

But when I wake up and I expect to see Truth,

I find Hope in front of me,

For the first time she arrived in the morning,

She told me the same things she told me at night,

And she simplified my problems and stuck by me.

 

Hope wasn’t fake at all,

She wasn’t imaginary

Only Truth was,

And ever since I understood that,

I never saw Truth again.

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Math connect

Sometimes in math, an equation or a problem doesn’t have a real number solution, for example the square root of a negative number. This is where an imaginary number (i), that is a part of the complex number system, comes in (i equals square root of -1). However, even while i is not a real number, one of its property is that when it is squared it equals -1, a real number.

This poem connects with this concept of  imaginary numbers. Sometimes in life our problems don’t have a real solution and that is when hope steps in, just like an imaginary number. While hope stays ‘imaginary’ for most part, with a little more belief in hope we can ‘power it up’ turning it into reality.