Sometimes life deals you something quite unexpected. You can prepare for a journey, pack for a trip, study for a test, plan for a function and then a monkey wrench gets thrown at your head. The flight gets cancelled or your luggage gets lost. The professor decides to give an oral exam or passes out blue books and asks you to write an essay about RNA transcriptase when you were expecting a 100 question, multiple choice test on all of genetics. You live in Vermont and a hurricane causes wide spread flooding and washes away a 140 year old bridge. A hurricane. Life is unpredictable.
Those little reminders that despite the best planning, a curve ball can be pitched at your head. Think a sinker is coming and you get beamed with a knuckle ball. Random.
But the best players win by playing the game. They swing and they swing A LOT. Practice in the cages prepares you for the game. Life is no different. And it is the rare connection with the unexpected curve ball that sails over the Green Monster. Life is the stringing together of all the rare and unexpected events and they are made all the more noticeable by the bracketing of the everyday and expected. Life is rarely a cultured pearl necklace. The string of perfectly matched precious beads are not the best metaphor for a life. The uniformity is a measured study in control and manipulated perfection. Instead, life is like a homemade cookie: chunky, nobbly and filled with who knows what? Take a bite and get gooey chocolate or nuts or oatmeal or raisin….of a chunk of pretzel…or a cranberry. Ya never know. And it is an adventure, a delight to try new things.
For my birthday, I will try some new, new things. And I will remember some landmark moments in th epast of being adventurous and doing something new and out of character. For one….I did not eat a fresh, slice of raw tomato on a sandwich until I was in college. My boyfriend Andy insisted I try his tuna on an onion biaylis with Jewish mustard, a thick slice of onion and fresh Beefsteak tomato and a slice of Swiss cheese. Weird all the way around. And a sandwich I still love.
New and different is a good thing.