Fibonacci’s Waiting Room

I don’t know if it was the sweet relief of the mammogram report I’d received that morning, the unusually large crowd in my breast cancer surgeon’s waiting room, or the fact that my surgeon is Italian that got me thinking about Fibonacci.

I’m no saint, but I’ve mostly stopped resenting these medical holdups. We’re not called “patients” for nothing. During appalling waits—this one was an hour and a half—I remind myself that I’ve waited this long at Discount Tires. I usually bring a book, and this time I plopped on my lap a 4 ½-pound, just-purchased retrospective of one of my favorite artists, David Hockney. I began flipping through the 359 pages of wildly passionate full-color paintings.

I find there’s hardly a better way to escape waiting room décor or celebrate life than to revel in David Hockney. Having just emerged from a month of six labs and check-ups with a clean bill of health and just one easy appointment to go, I was enjoying a brief rush of indestructibility. Suddenly, one of David Hockney’s loose lively watercolors got me fantasizing about the circuitous Routes of Life.

My mind wandered back to the moment two-and-a-half years ago when, sitting alone on my futon one evening, I found The Lump. It was a kind of Corner, and I’d never be the same. As time in the waiting room inched on, and almost everyone but me got called, I began to question whether “corners” really worked as a metaphor for the transforming somethings or someones that have crashed, abandoned, or snuck into my life.

Because corners tend to be 90-degree angles. Turning a corner would radically change my entire world, blocking me from viewing even the immediate past and totally changing my view of the future. Life isn’t really like that, I thought. Although I can usually identify an intersecting point, the curves tend to be softer, more like those on an interstate.

And that’s when I thought of the Fibonacci Sequence, a number series which occurs in nature, creating the familiar spirals of the nautilus, the seeds on a sunflower, and our galaxy. I learned about Fibonacci when I wrote a book about measures and numbers called Necessary Numbers, and I never forgot the guy. Fibonacci was an 13th century Italian mathematician who not only helped introduce Arabic numerals (e.g. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) to Europe, but also discovered a sequence of numbers that recurs in nature with unusual frequency.

It’s really quite simple:

Each number in the series is the sum of the preceding two, starting with 0 and 1. So 0+1=1, and 1+1=2, then 1+2=3, and 2+3=5, and 3+5=8, and on into infinity. And it turns out that using the Fibonacci Golden Rectangle, a line intersecting opposing corners form an ever enlarging curve..

My life is like that, I thought, as the stocky woman in a suit and high heels sitting next to me was called into the maze beyond the waiting room. If I could identify all the powerful events, persons, ideas, and discoveries that have changed the course of my life, they might spiral from a tight center, ever larger, until finally flinging me into the universe.