The Power of One
When I changed the calendar, I immediately recognized it wasn't just another New Year's Day, it was 1-1-11, intriguing numbers. I pondered this no further, until arriving home that night, when for an instant, I happened to glance at the clock precisely when the time clicked on to 11.11pm. A bizarre coincidence on such a memorable date; I went to bed thinking that this moment must have some profound significance, though I was entirely uncertain of what that may possibly be. My instinct was to call a friendly neighborhood numerologist and ask his advice about this perplexing issue, perhaps a concise answer would enable me to sleep better. Too late, things were rapidly escalating; my mind was already way ahead in November. November 11th to be precise. 11.11 and 11 seconds on 11- 11-11, now that suddenly seemed so much more impressive... sublime inspiration for hordes of over excitable loonies to predict cataclysmic consequences for the world. But then I considered, if we are all still here, there are actually two opportunities to experience 11.11 on the 11th of November this year, both am and pm, and possibly even more if you strategically planned travel through different time zones. I was now focused on which would likely be the more important time, surely the first to occur on that day? This subsequently led me to think about which time zone would encounter this phenomenon first, which person would be the one, truly the first one to realize what had just happened? Well they would definitely be on Kiritimati, but it would take further research to ascertain exact coordinates on the island, maybe Google Earth already have the facility to track the single person who is roaming in the right place at the right time, when these spectacular clock convergences happen ... Perchance it would be worth the trip to share this utterly unique, once in a lifetime (okay, maybe twice) experience, with all the other people on the same longitude. As my thoughts progressed I mused about nanoseconds, where might there be an accurate digital clock in the southern hemisphere which could provide a read out of even more ones at this crucial moment on the 11th? Then I thought, maybe this was going a little too far, after all the Mayans were good with numbers, and they didn't have digital clocks.
So back to basics, let's forget about seconds and stick with plain, simple, 11.11 on 11-11-11. Now lets add up all those ones, so that gives us a total of 10. Then if we add the resulting one and zero together and we end up with one. Thought I was ready to sleep at this moment, but of course it was now 1.am, and I knew 1.11 was only 11 minutes away, so a very short poem I wrote some years ago kept on running through my head: Where is one? One is within. Within what? Within one.
