Story Far From Oaxaca

I have a friend who’s a high school math teacher. For fun in his spare time he’s teaching himself how to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. Often when we get together we’ll involve ourselves in one of two activities—walking or sipping tea. Not once have we dared mix the two. 
Offhandedly this friend is always teaching me things. You could say, in that way, I’m a theorem to him. Often we’ll take our walks in the largest cemetery of our city. Acres of headstones around us and my friend explaining some theoretical principle to me and me following along, asking questions then, hearing his answers, asking for clarifications. 
One day he plans to move to Oaxaca. There, that’s one thing you now know about him. He is once divorced, like me. There, something you know about both of us. Two people wired for natural curiosity strolling leisurely through a cemetery. 
I talk about art, he talks science. He’s always surprising me with little facts and explanations. From his days as an engineering student, he tells me, he learned about Lenz’s Law. When I talk about making art, it reminds him of Lenz’s Law. A rough approximation of the law, as I remember it, is: the stronger the current running through a circuit, the stronger the resistance. I’d been talking about the benefits of “not forcing things”; don’t push an idea, rather gently edge it along; know when to wait, when to germinate. 
I wonder. Does Lenz’s Law apply to his efforts to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem? By his own admission, much of the mathematics involved is beyond his ability. He smiles without changing face, the smile in his eyes. Sometimes proof of a current’s worth is in the resistance it inspires, he tells me. I agree with that, I say. Case in point, the strain I often experience when trying to follow along while he describes or explains things. 
There is one habit where our dispositions join. On occasion we both sit and close our eyes and meditate. He’s more serious about the habit, every now and then goes off for a week at a time to sit in the company of strangers, float like a water strider on the surface of his mind. It occurs to me this might also be worth mentioning in light of his Law. The mind is a circuit, one that loathes effortful demands upon it. So maybe we’re masochists, I tell him. Our minds take pleasure in confronting what they’re naturally given to resist. Could be, he says, pleased to see how far I’ve carried the metaphor. Sipping steaming hot tea, burning our lips; ambling among headstones on a spring afternoon, joyously, consciously mortal. 
My friend has two daughters, one aged twenty-one, the other eighteen. I’m childless but remarried, he’s single. On this difference he jokes: he’s the spirit but I’m the letter of the Law. One day I hope, I tell him, the spirit carries him to Oaxaca.