How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers^*, she said.)

Don't doubt that this was an important question. You too have many particularly vivid memories of a parent or a neighbor or a friend imparting some such information to yourself. I can remember clearly a college roommate's telling me what his father had told him about shaving with or against the grain of the beard and, before that, my dad's showing me how to fold...toilet paper. Oh, you don't just wad it up?

And there are other questions that don't seem so mundane. "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" to quote Paul Gauguin's famous painting, "D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?":

We want answers to such questions. And to get them we often look for someone we trust to tell us. A Tony Robbins or a Wayne Dyer or an M. Scott Peck or Norman Vincent Peale. The last two are dead now, but they were big not many years ago. Or someone who claimed to speak for or from God, like Moses or Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Those last ones have stood the "tests" of lots of other people following them and of their having done so for a long, long time. And two 19th century American prophets, the Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith and Jehovah's Witness Charles Taze Russell, have had their respective international followers for a while, too.

Whichever source we accept is almost always one that our friends or our family or the members of our community accept. If it isn't a natural philosopher or Moses or Muhammad, but it is Joseph Smith, then it's likely the Mormons for us too.

It helps if whatever source is near to hand gives answers more or less like the ones we want to believe. In our rebellious stage, if we had one, we were disinclined to believe what our family or our neighbors believed. We left, to return later perhaps as a prodigal child, to look anew at the source familiar to our childhood and adolescence.

If we've traveled or read a bit, we may now be aware that that source isn't the only one. If it had been Jesus, it might now include the possibility of a humanist philosopher or of Gautama or Muhammad. The question may have become whether to choose one of these or...?

[more to be unfolded later]

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*How many folds to get twelve layers depends on whether you're using one- or two-ply paper. The speaker didn't cover this, but I've found that an efficient way to get twelve layers with one-ply paper is to

1. Unroll twelve squares (or an equivalent length).
2. Fold in half (lengthwise).
3. Fold in half again.
4. Fold over one third.
5. Fold over the other third.

With two-ply, unroll six squares and skip the third step.