The Marvelous Truth About Life

Here’s the truth, sometimes things don’t go our way. Other times they’re a surprise. We fail. We learn. Then we grow. For me, this is a powerful reminder of how I should aspire to live my life: expectant of setbacks, yet willing to learn and conquer them.

Here’s the truth: with this consideration, life may be deemed as capricious, erratic, precarious, twisted or all of the above. We all have our highs and lows, and often times life’s route will twist around and strangle us. But incorporating “carpe diem” into the picture, I unintentionally observe that the moments of strangeness, and singularity are the ones that may really bring about the biggest metamorphosis, respect, courage, kindness and light.

Honestly, I feel I sail through life setting a high bar of expectation. And when failure shows his figure, I find myself unprepared for his magic. It was two days ago when I was at my friend Sophie’s house that I noticed myself setting this bar. I was waiting for Sophie at the bottom of the main staircase where a beautiful console table sat. Having nothing better to do, I

Bridge I painted showing Earth on one side and an unknown world on the other.

observed the shade of its wood, the angle of its cuts and the shape of its pedestal on the bottom. Yet the part of the table that grasped my attention was the neck which connected the pedestal to the surface. It was made with two skinnier pieces of wood, twisted together to form a spiral. Twisted, I remember thinking, never seen one quite like this. It evoked a sense relating to life: twisted, ever-changing, and precarious. Staring at the twist in the neck some more, I realized how this related to my life in some ways. I try to develop the best version of myself that I can, yet there are always kids, nature, society, hopes, goals and simply fate that throw me off track. This is where I become tangled within the many routes I could possibly travel to reach my final goal. Maybe I’ll find a new route. Maybe I’ll across a bridge and enter a completely new world and maybe I’ll stay. Regardless of the path I select, now, I am more consciously aware of the nature of setbacks and failure, darkness and gloom. As Krista Tippett puts it, ““You know, the moments I look back in my life and think, God, those are the moments that made me, were moments of struggle.” So here’s the marvelous truth about life: it is felicitously twisted.