Happy Pi Day!

I think schools in America celebrate Pi Day today, this day being 3/14, the closest you get to Pi- 3.14 (It is recognised as such by the U.S. Congress itself). To be exact, you can celebrate Pi Minute at 1:59 p.m. today. If pi is read up to seven decimal places, it becomes 3.1415926, which gives you a chance to observe a minute of silence or something on March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m. every year.

When you hold a string straight and tight across and then run it round the circle, you can do it 3.1415926... times, which means if you want to be precise, you can't- the decimals run on and on to trillions and you can never stop cutting the string and bridge the gap to perfection.

Pi is not a chance number, here I find that Pi is in the disks of the moon and the sun: the double helix of DNA revolves round Pi. Pi is in the rainbow, in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water, Pi emerges in its spreading rings. Pi is in the waves and ripples and spectra of all kinds, in all colours and music. Pi is in life all around us, and when we die and become a statistic, it encompasses us in the tables of death, in what is known as a Gaussian distribution of deaths in a population; when a person dies, the event "feels" pi.

Pi has something to do with squaring the circle. Try your best with your geometry set- you can't make a square of the same size from a circle, because pi is what it is: there is no end to it. Pi is endless and the random march of decimals reveal no pattern. Pi, mathematicians say, is a transcendental number.

Pi is a challenge to the intellect. When we speak of order, we speak of something that has pattern, something you can predict, something that has completion. Pi, unruly and untiring, is of a different order.

What can you do on Pi day? Wikihow gives you some ideas- "Simply use 3.14 as a unit of measure. Instead of being 31 years old, you are 9pi years old (approaching your 10th birthday). With this same approach, you can find out your next pi birthday (don't forget to celebrate it when it comes!)." It helps, or does it?

I have a different idea: let us not resist the wild and the unpredictable and the incomprehensible facts of our life: the children who won't listen to us, the friends who won't do what they say, the wife who thinks she knows you better than you do, and of course- the runaway mind; the moments that throw your life off-base, that reveal your past in a new light- they are with us. They are what make us, they are us. Let us accept them and celebrate the colour they provide to our lives.

God, Perfect in Himself, has no reason to limit himself to be the God of the gullible, He could also be the God of the sceptic. In His merciful and all-knowing compassion, He must have ordered the world so that it is comprehensible to the queries of intellect, to the laws of causation. But He has feelings, which the natural laws don't have: it could be His friendly reminder, humorous suggestion, to make a number that beats all efforts at counting and ordering- to show the linear mind that you can't square the circle. There is more to life than logic, there is place for some magic.

Pi then, could be God's Smiley.

Happy Pi Day!