Tuesday, June 30, 2015

#16 - Love me a ton or to the moon and back

I was going over a math problem with my students, and we were converting units and trying to solve it. 

After we did, I looked at the board and I wondered aloud: "What does it mean when someone says, 'I love you to the moon and back'? 

A quick Google search reveals that the moon is 238,900 miles from the Earth. So the moon and back would be 477,800 miles.

That's a lot to love someone.


Personally, I would drive a few hundred miles, maybe a few thousand out of love. 

But what if someone told you they loved you to the moon, but not back?

Now from what I can tell, the general expectation is a round trip, so I think a lot of people would be offended.

But that's still almost 300,000 miles! Shouldn't you be happy with just one earth-to-moon distance? Or maybe it's that you need to come back or else you're stranded there forever?

Okay, forget about the whole moon thing. How about 'I love you a ton'

Hmm, so you love me 2,000 pounds? I wonder if in other countries they say "I love you a kilo'? (No, seriously people in/from other countries - do they?)

What if someone says I love you a quarter ton, or I love you 100 pounds - would you feel cheated?

Back to the original scenario, how is love best measured, in distance or in weight? Is the ton of love greater than the lunar voyage, or vice versa?

After about 30 seconds of this, my students were begging, "Can we just do math problems already??"

Ha - it worked. Genius. 

We moved on, but afterward I kept thinking about it. How do you measure love? Is it with time? With money?

What is your time worth, anyway?

It seems silly to try to calculate these things and put values on them, but we do. 

But are they really worth that? Can they be measured?

I'm mostly posing questions, because I don't have the answers. Not for you anyway. I'm too busy trying to figure them out for myself. 

But I do know that some of the most valuable things are perhaps infinite. 

Time may be finite, but we all get the same handful of seconds every day. 

And as for love, well that certainly could be an endless supply. Is there a way to run out?

So maybe we should love people to the moon and back. 

And then some. 

I mean, why not? Whatever the measure is, if we're doing it right, there's more where that came from.