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, or the ball might 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. 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 worse. 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. 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. 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.
You come out of it full of adrenaline, laughing or maybe even crying. After it
all, there’s an end to it, where you walk out into the light of the world with
all its people and its sounds. 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 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 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 get there. 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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