Life is like a pinball game. You strike the ball and depending on the angle you hit it, it can go anywhere. You could ring up a lot of points or you can end up in the hole. Sometimes the ball will just shoot right between your flippers where you can’t reach it and you lose. You lose a life. There are a lot of bells and whistles and sometimes music. Sometimes you’re the ball and sometimes you’re the flipper. Sometimes you’re the kid slapping the button that moves the flipper.
Sometimes life is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. You read the first few pages when you enter and then at a certain point you are faced with a decision to make. Then you make your choice and something happens because of that choice. It might be good. It might be bad. After reading along whatever scenario you’ve chosen, it eventually gives you another choice. This choice can change your fortune for better or for worst. You might be able to go back to the page where you made that choice and take the other option to see where it goes, but that’s against the rules. And in life, going against the rules has its own consequences and is not recommended. It’s a luxury you really shouldn’t utilize simply because it’s sleazy, not to mention cowardly.
Sometimes Life is like a haunted funhouse. You are completely in the dark, and loud scary things jump out at you without warning and you have to react. Sometimes you may pee your pants. Sometimes you will jump into the arms of the person closest to you. Sometimes that person might be a complete stranger or it might be the person you love most in this world. You might exercise the option to punch the actor in the face out of sheer self-defence, but this might end things really quick for you. But you come out of it full of adrenaline, laughing or maybe even crying. But there’s an end to it where you walk out into the light of the world with all its people and its sounds and you can look back and remember what you’d been through.
Life can be like a job interview. You’re given a set of questions and you need to come up with the best answers as quickly as possible. You will have no idea if you are giving the actual best answer while you are saying it. All you can do is hope that your experience is wide enough to cover all the contingencies. Experience helps. At the end of the interview, you will still have no idea if you will be hired or if you have bombed completely. If you’re hired, you get a phone call a couple weeks down the line. If you’ve bombed, you get no phone call at all.
Life can be like a game of cards. The outcome depends on how you play the cards the dealer hands you. This might make the dealer seem like they have some kind of power over you, but the truth is the dealer hasn’t got a goddamned clue what they’re dealing either. The power is in the cards and in the choices you make with them. The power is yours, Planeteers.
In the end, the choices are always yours. The choices might bring either rewards or consequences. You never really know which until after you’ve made your decision and the result comes into play. You might get warnings from people who have been through similar things before, or you might simply have a sense of prescience to figure out what awaits after you’ve made the decision.
Good or bad, the results of your decisions aren’t something that is handed down to you by any kind of providence. The results of your actions have always been there, just waiting for you to arrive at them. That said, there is no destiny, no path that lays before you that you can’t deviate from. There is only a string of good decisions that line up to read as a good life, or a string of bad decisions that end up in disaster.
We only know what we know. We can take events in our life as lessons and refer back to them when we need help making a decision. Mistakes are opportunities to learn and he who has not failed has yet to live. You only fail when you stop trying. You don’t score if you don’t shoot. You don’t win if you don’t play the game.
You know what you know. Knowledge, when you think of it that way, is like a flashlight when the way ahead is dark and invisible. You take what you’ve learned and apply it later, otherwise you haven’t learned a goddamned thing.
Things that might seem like cosmic intervention are really nothing but a happy alignment of circumstances. It might seem mindblowingly improbable, but that’s the thing with probability. It’s a spectrum. From impossible to certain, there are an almost limitless number of points in between. You can touch that rainbow anywhere. And when it’s good, you can revel in that goodness. You can be happy it happened. Indeed, happiness comes from happenstance.
You can chew on that one all day if you want.
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