The Marble Man

Imagine that you have a bag of marbles. Now, imagine that at the beginning of every day, all of your marbles are strewn across the floor, and the goal of every single day is to collect all of your marbles and put them back into your bag. Sounds easy, right? WRONG.

First of all, as your day goes on, you may be doing fine. You are slowly but surely collecting those marbles. But occasionally, some one will walk by and kick a marble out of your path. Now you've got to go way out of your way to get that marble. Either you can put it off and get it later, or you can spend a lot of your time retrieving that marble, and have less time to get the others. Either way, it is an inconvenience.

Second, sometimes people will walk by and some of the marbles from their bag will fall in your pathway. Now you've got to pick up those, and your marbles. More marbles! Or, if you have someone who can't handle all of their marbles, you can volunteer to help them out and take some of their marbles. However, you still have to get your marbles too...more marbles. And sometimes, when someone is a real jerk, they will deliberately drop their marbles into your path and walk away. More. Marbles.

Gotta Catch 'Em All!

So as you can see, throughout the course of your day, it becomes more and more difficult to get all of those marbles. On the occasion that you do get all of your marbles by bedtime, you are pretty damn proud of yourself. You feel good. It's been a good day. Now you dump all of your marbles back on to the floor, and set up to do it again tomorrow. But most of the time, you won't get all of your marbles. There will still be marbles rolling around on the floor and your bag will only be half full or a quarter full by the time you go to sleep. And what's worse, since you didn't get all of your marbles tonight, now you have to add extra on for tomorrow. That means double-time marble picking for you!

Now, take a step back. Look at the situation from an outsider's perspective. You are no longer the person collecting the marbles. You are now watching that person. What do you see? Well, unless you know them or what they are doing, you probably see someone looking crazy, spazzing out over a bunch of stupid little marbles and scattering across the floor to reach them. Why are they doing it? What is their purpose with this incessant marble hunting? You don't know, obviously. A better question would be, do they know? Do they know why they are chasing the marbles?

If you are still reading this, then I haven't absolutely destroyed you with my goofy, midnight-inspired story of the Marble Man. Allow me to explain myself:

The Marble Man

The Marble Man is you, or any person, really. Then, what are the marbles? The marbles are the items on your daily agenda. You have to get all of them completed before the day is over, and if you are anything like me, things (and people) often get in your way. You often finish your day without getting everything you wanted to get done accomplished. And then you have more things to do the next day. It's a never-ending process of searching and gathering, kind of like what we do when we use computers. Only I thought it would be easier (and a tad bit cuter) to compare this process to the routine of the Marble Man, rather than the workings of a computer.

The end of the story is what really interests me. If you take a step back from your daily agenda, and look at everything from an outsider's perspective...do you look crazy? Can other people understand why you are doing the things you are doing? Do you know why you are doing these things?

It has often helped me in life to look at things from the broader, long-term perspective. So what if you had to drop that class? It doesn't necessarily mean you will never graduate or get a job. So what if your boyfriend/girlfriend broke up with you? It doesn't mean you will be forever alone. I do understand and appreciate the fact that sometimes we, as people, just get caught in the moment. We wouldn't be human if we didn't care about anything unless it related to our distant future. The present is a crucial time. But worrying about every little thing that happens to us on a daily basis-madly trying to collect all of our marbles-isn't going to make us any happier. In fact, most of the time, it only makes us more frustrated.

We are Marble Men, naturally and unnaturally. And sometimes, we lose are marbles. That's okay. As long as we know that it isn't the end of the world and we are going to come out on top on the other side, we'll be fine. After all-

We are Marble Men.

Who Am I?

I am about to embark on a slight rant, so please, bare with me...

There is something on my mind that I want to try and articulate as clearly as I can figure. It's this little thing called "life". Life starts out as a single string: simple, headed in a single direction, easy to figure out. As we grow up, our life elaborates on itself: the string begins forming knots on itself, tying to other strings, etc. We meet thousands of people throughout life, from people we only see once, to people who become our very dearest friends. We begin school, we learn about numbers and letters, we learn that there is a whole world out there that is bigger than our little town that we grew up in. We begin feeling new emotions that we had never known existed before, or never recognized. And yet, in the early stages of our lives, all of this little stuff never really means anything because, at the end of the day, we go back home to our families (if we are so blessed to have them), eat dinner, watch some TV, and go to bed. It's simple, because we don't have to worry about the next day, and we don't think about the future beyond what we know is coming. That is the simple beauty of being a child.

Once we reach middle school, everything becomes a crisis. Puberty is the monster that eats up our childhood and starts turning us into little minions of a system created by adults that we never knew. Believe me, I've gone through it, and I came out on the other side. Around this time period is when we begin to understand just how much we are about to have dumped on our plates. We begin thinking about high school, begin worrying about the people that are going to remain in our lives outside of middle school, and we begin wondering bit by bit about the future-at least the next four years. Yet, life is still fairly simple. Sure, there's more homework, and hormones are beginning to drive us crazy with week long crushes and fandoms that turn us into raging emotional machines, but we still have the opportunity to turn back into our child-like selves occasionally, because our future is decided for us at the time. What else do we have to worry about?

Then comes high school. What an adventure! We leave as people drastically different than the people we were when we came in. We grow so much that, sometimes, we have a hard time catching up with ourselves. This is when things start to get messy, especially around the junior or senior year. Our string begins to get so cluttered with connections and knots that we have a difficult time figuring out where we began, reverting back to our roots. And I've realized something: throughout all of this, we begin to become detached from what it all means. We begin worrying about "where am I going to go to college?" and "who are the people I need to know to have a career?" rather than "when is the next time I will see my friend?" or "what did I do today to positively impact someone else's life?" The true trickery begins as soon as we set foot on our college campuses.

Now we don't even know who we are. We go in to school with a major in something we hate half of the time, just because we are told that is the only way we will make any money, or because our parents force us to make that career choice. And the people who choose a major in something that they "love" are truthfully not that much better. We still go to school, meticulously planning every minute of every day in order to optimize our chances of being "successful", and we barely spare any time for the people in our lives outside of academics and job experience. We stop doing things because we want to, or we want to do them for the wrong reason. We quit trying to be happy, and we forget what that word really means. We say we are "happy" when we receive a good grade on a test. We declare our joy when we have time to watch a movie or eat some ice cream in between study breaks. But what does it mean to be actually, truthfully happy? What is it all about?

I guess that is the main reason for this post: what is it all about? Why are we here? Some people live their whole entire lives without reaching a conclusion. Some people think they have the answer, but are never really sure. I personally believe that there can be multiple different reasons for a person's existence, and if we find even one, we are luckier than anyone else in the world.

Is it all about falling in love? Finding that one person that we can love unconditionally, and that will love us back? Some might think so. Is it about helping others to have the lives they deserve but could never reach? Maybe. Is it about some religious struggle, something bigger than ourselves that we can never fully understand? A lot of people would argue "yes". Truth is, I don't know. I don't know that I ever will. At the stage that I am at right now, I am struggling to even find out who I am. What does it mean to be me? What do I stand for? What words come to mind when other people think of me?

Who am I?

I apologize for overloading you with my silly and somewhat irrelevant words, but I just had to get this all out of my brain: it was taking up too much space in there. I never like to end my posts on anything but a positive note, so here is something to consider: maybe our "destinies" and our purpose in life are not completely ours to decide. Remember the string? I would think it would be rather difficult to get all of those knots and ties out on our own. But with the help of others, I would imagine we could eventually revert our string back to it's natural state. With the help of others, maybe we could realize what it all means, and take ourselves back to the beginning. Back to the time when we were first born, and the only things that mattered, were the only things that mattered.

The only things that mattered in life.  

An Unexpected Interruption

Blogging at completely inappropriate times seems to be my specialty lately. It's always when I am doing something completely unrelated that my thoughts decide to take a field trip and explore a topic lodged in the crevices of my mind. Today, I was walking to the book store and contemplating the overwhelming amount of things that I need to do today (and every day) when my brain skipped a beat and my Grandpa Jack came into play.

Jack I've always imagined as an academic sort of man: someone I could easily see as being a Professor if he had the opportunity. He enjoyed contemplating life and making up his own philosophies about how it was best lived. At the same time, exploring multiple subjects of interest (engineering in cars, reading the daily news, being an English scholar) was also one of his favorite hobbies. I was only two when he passed away, and yet often I feel like I can sense myself mimicking his ways, consciously or not. I too am a person interested in many subjects: English, Politics, Economics, Philosophy, Theater-pretty much anything but Math and Chemistry interest me to some extent. It is this ever prevalent hunger for knowledge which pushes me forward, and pulls me back at the same time.

Did you have these problems, Jack? Did you want to know everything, but you knew that you didn't have time to take it all in? Did you ever get frustrated when you couldn't do everything your mind was pushing you to do? I guess it all goes along with the saying "Everyone's best at something, but no one's best at everything".

Sometimes, it drives me crazy that I sign myself up for all of these different activities and classes, even when I know there is little time to spare as it is. But I cannot justify not doing everything in my power to absorb the abundant knowledge that is present and waiting for me in college. When else am I going to get the chance to learn about these things? Let's face it, after college is over, my opportunity window will be drastically narrowed, leaving only a minute space for freedom. So cramming all of these experiences into these four years is what I feel like I am here to do.

It sort of amuses me when I can picture Jack watching me from wherever he is, smiling in fond reminiscence as he remembers when he was at this stage in his own life. I can vividly imagine his experience being quite the same as mine. Can you hear me, Jack? What is it that you are trying to tell me, interrupting my thoughts on this busy Tuesday afternoon?