Frustration sets in on this cold rainy afternoon. The calm patter of raindrops sounds more like a thousand nails screeching down a chalkboard. The Buddhist ceremonial path to enlightenment though a room with a thousand demons seems comparatively simple – at least there the demons you face are of your own making. Glancing down at the page, these numbers and glyphs seem all so otherworldly and incomprehensible. Either way your path to enlightenment, knowledge, understanding… whatever you want to call it, is not coming anytime soon. Speaking another language is not easy, let alone an ancient language like mathematics. You catch yourself daydreaming, or perhaps more aptly playing in a maze of self-inflicted mental torture. A never-ending labyrinth of “if only” scenarios.

“If only, I’d paid more attention the first time”, “If only, I’d had help to learn this”, “If only, I’d valued learning this” A hot ball of anger and frustration is brewing in your tummy and you find yourself wanting to cry. “It shouldn’t be this difficult”, “I don’t have time to learn this now”, “If I knew this already, I wouldn’t be in this pickle”. “Mmm pickles sound delicious. I’m going to go eat some pickles and…”

You catch these thoughts and bring yourself back to the letters and numbers. “Focus” you say to yourself! “It’s only maths. Many other people speak this language. I can too”

Why would I want to learn maths? I already know maths anyway – I can add, subtract, and count my savings so that I avoid a big credit-card debt. And yet, there are times when it feels like I’m reading children’s books when others are casually flipping through Tolstoy. Or perhaps hearing a joke in a language I’m mostly familiar with, but the humour is entirely lost on me. I begin to question, “Why am I not in this club? How can I get in?”

Occasionally, you hear something you are adamant that only a select few can solve in this world. The top 1% of geniuses in this world – “the lucky ones” you call them. Do they need to learn or are they just “gifted”? Try this one on for size:

It’s a rainy afternoon at home with your friends and you are itching to play your favourite boardgame, Cluedo, but you’ve lost the six-sided die from the box. Fortunately, you just happen to have a great big bag full of 4-sided dice. How can you use these dice to create the same possible rolls and probability as if you had a six-sided die?

Any ideas? Is your head spinning? Mine too. And yet others seem to be able to trade possible solutions like they’re talking about the weekend football results. Forget sporting clubs, how do I get into this club?! Who is allowed to join and what is the price of entry?

Learning is frustration. From the moment we are born, we are screaming, crying, exasperated, and frustrated with learning. Consciousness that these processes are taking place is irrelevant. As babies, we are learning, and we are frustrated!

Have you ever watched a relative new-born baby do tummy time? You should. They HATE it! They scream, yell and panic. With time and practise, they improve, become familiar and their neck and arm muscles become stronger and more adept. But it requires exasperating daily practise for only miniscule improvements – slowly, one day gaining the ability to roll-over, then to crawl, and eventually, to walk. From observing and reflecting on this one activity that babies engage in, the question arises, why do we as adults believe that learning stops? That learning is either easy or irrelevant.

I suggest you make peace with being an eternal student, embrace and accept the inevitable frustration that comes with learning. Once you’ve mastered a new skill, why stop? Instead, prepare yourself for the next frustrating adventure because there’s an infinite list of new talents to learn and the tiny gains along the journey are worth celebrating as much as the result. Mark each tiny milestone in amongst all the frustration to prevent you from throwing the metaphorical baby out with the bath water and giving up.

From tummy-time to mathematics, whatever the analogy, good mental-health requires daily practise and constant learning. If you refuse to accept the inevitable frustration that comes with learning, then by avoiding it altogether you’ll inevitably lock yourself out of a club that you really would like to be a part of. Surely, being on the outside looking in would prove far more frustrating than accepting the difficult journey of learning ahead of you. For me, I think it all comes down to a simple mathematical equation:

L = F > 0

Learning equals Frustration… but it’s sure greater than doing nothing.