On the road…again!
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

On Staying Positive

We only go around once in life, so staying happy, contented, and positive is largely a personal assignment we take on, each and every day.  They say that choosing happiness is a personal choice.  Being content may require a struggle but we can discipline ourselves into believing it, or pretending to believe it, along the way to actually achieving it.   

Poor people by the millions will tell you that they are content with their lot, and say so quite sincerely.  Not everyone, mind you, but among those who might be labeled as malcontents, you will also find hordes of those who are not happy.  Making the transition from unhappiness to happiness, and from being a malcontent to being content is possible.  To do so, however, it requires us to stay positive about the prospects. 

The philosopher Seneca once noted that if you are not happy here and now, you never will be.  Happily (pun intended), we can work on becoming happy and contented.

A self-effacing Footloose Forester knows that he was never the fastest, the most talented, or the smartest guy within sight, but he talked himself into being a plugger who was determined to do his best.  In doing so, he achieved contentment in his level of happiness.  Moving forward from now toward the future, he also disciplines himself into staying positive.   

Although he, like millions of others, struggled with Mathematics, he never gave up believing that he could get better if he put in the effort it takes to succeed.  And that takes a positive attitude.  He got good grades in math in high school, but failed math twice in college.  Of course, knowing math just to pass tests in school is one thing, but Footloose Forester found out along the road of life that there are countless applications of math to everyday problems and some applications that are there to be discovered.  For example, he champions the idea that rare gems and minerals never get completely mined out of existence, but their extraction history follows a decreasing asymptotic slope trending toward but never reaching zero.  The same goes for the idea of disappearing old growth forests.

A math professor suggested to him that finding the horizontal range of ejected volcanic bombs can be calculated by applying a formula of “time to rise” from the volcano, height of the eruption plume and then taking the third derivative of resultant inputs. Volcano watchers can observe and calculate eruption phenomena in real time, and the third derivative is calculated from differential calculus.

Footloose Forester dug into lava layers from the volcano Krakatau, so wanted to know how far away he could expect to see intact volcanic bombs that had a Krakatau origin. He had to stay positive about learning about real evidence and then backing up what he believed.

The math teacher in high school taught the Pythagorean Theorem in her class in plane geometry, and many years later the Footloose Forester applied it to make a distance measuring device from a bamboo staff in Indonesia.  He also applied the formulas regarding the circumference and diameters of circles to make a foresters’ diameter tape from rope.  He maintained a positive attitude that he could make those tools, and his success made him happy.