4

I used to have this strange thing going on in my head with numbers when I was a youngster, and even up to the time I was in high school. The number 4 was particularly significant. It was a "good" number and everything had to be done or counted in fours. This was not a common superstition or a lucky number sort of thing. It was a strange fixation on 4, an obsession, such that it sometimes distracted me from actually functioning normally. Similarly, the number 3 was bad. I could not bear to see things in 3's--three coins on the table, three pencils on the desk, three carrots on the plate. Three had to be escaped by conversion to 4 or 2. Multiples of 4 were good, multiples of three generally not. I was aware of this consuming fixation at the time, and I was aware that it was not right, and yet I was compelled in some deep and unreasoning part of myself to attend to the fixation, even if it meant being inattentive to other, more important things that were going on--such as what the teacher was saying in class. I would count to four over and over in my head, I would touch things four times, and would quietly say words four times. 

I don't know how this compulsion finally left me. The demands of higher functioning as I grew older? A more willful awareness?  I'm not sure. And still, I will sometimes catch myself giving the number 4 an automatic, unwarranted significance, although it now seems instantly odd rather than powerfully compelling. 

In a way, looking back, it has given me some small insight into how the brain can 'malfunction', so to speak. I know something of the torment, and the tyranny, suffered by one who has OCD. What is inscrutable, inexplicable, is where such compulsions come from. How does it occur in the mind to attach a magical, and a critical importance to a number? What is happening, or has happened, in the mind when we find ourselves attaching such compelling yet unreasoning significance to something which, in and of itself, has no significance? 

I read once about a woman who started to go somewhere in her car, but straightaway, upon seeing a dog in the road, wondered whether she had hit the dog--and although she stopped and looked and saw no injured dog, she could not stop herself from driving around the block again and again to make sure on each passage that she had not hit a dog. Finally, she had to simply go home and give up on whatever trip she had planned to take. 

How very strange it is, and yet how very real.