2-1 - Life

Life is a perfectly honed ball…That’s how it starts out. Everything is perfect – as far as you are concerned. Food comes, warmth comes and you don’t know what you are missing so you never miss it.

As time goes by if you look at that perfectly honed ball under a magnifying glass you will see a few jagged edges, not many and the divots not very deep, but they are undeniably there. They come from tiny disappointments – coloring outside the lines, losing the 3 legged race, being told you can’t have that 3rd cookie. It all starts to add up, chipping away, chipping away, tiny little chips.

The more intrusive lacerations soon arrive, now visible with the naked eye. There is an illness – not just a cold, the first broken heart, the realization of the less than perfect body, Grandpa’s dies, the dog dies and the academic and social failures – a D in geometry and being a wallflower at your first dance.

Sometimes, if you are really well adjusted you can hone the ball again – polish it up so that it is not so ragged, doesn’t catch on everything and slow you down. You can never get back that mirror finish, but you can polish away some of the pain. Be aware that the polish is not permanent. Never will be, it is meant to be chipped away at. It is life and if it is not chipped away then you did not live.

But there is more, now many more serious gashes begin to appear. They are large gouges that leave the ball unrecognizable. They are completely un-repairable. These are the death of a lover, a mother, a father, a child; the loss of a job or the failure of a business; the end of a dream, a flood, an accident, a purposeful destruction. Now you are seeing life as it really is. It is no longer the smooth and shiny ball it appeared at the beginning. In fact it is no longer round. Large sections of it have been eaten away, deep into the core. It is nothing but a random shape hardly able to hold itself together. It was always supposed to be used up, cut into, and hacked away. That’s what it means to live, to love, to experience life.

My ball is nothing but a spiky, irregular mass, nothing much left of it now. I guess enough to live on for the rest of this life. And it is comforting to know that there can be no more surprises, no more devastating realizations. All of that has been eaten away and it is smooth sailing from here on out.