Consider the life of a paper clip, an unassuming little piece of twisted steel with a heady job: to hold things together. I’d half feel sorry for the little guy, all bent up, ever working to keep things in place, its burden more askew than not at times, and often over the capacity of its capabilities- stretched beyond its means. Until I realize that story sounds wayyyy familiar.
There are days when we all feel a bit like a paper clip, as we work to keep our shit together, the pages of our stories unkempt but assembled into neat little stacks of congruity. And sometimes we are a staple, the biographies of our pasts profoundly rooted into our psyche, as we dig our claws into our current goings on with controlled caution prompted by our previous experiences, lining them up at the edges best as we can, and piercing their corners with a sharp stab of supposed stability.
We reach outward in wide lengths like Stretch Armstrong, grasping at our lives, attempting to compartmentalize the flower scented hours of one event, and sorting away the grease-soaked drippings of another with a wicked snap of our synaptic whips, clipping and stapling fat stacks of allegories and filing them away in their ordained quarters within our minds.
We keep some of our symbolic parables closeby for ready reference, guides that can serve us in as many positive ways as negative, depending on the prominent emotion residing in our hearts at a given time. And some of our most troublesome – yet possibly the most esoteric, we tuck into the farthest reaches of a locked up wardrobe in a hidden room in a lonely house stationed in the deepest recesses of our brains, folding these eclectic moments away like a winter sweater we pack up in a cardboard box come March.
Still, even as identified by our very name, we are being – we be, we do, we are. We are dynamic and ever-evolving carbon based creatures, with the gift of critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to develop who we are as much within as without. We are, as I like to say, Human Becomings.
Our stories are ever flowing and ongoing, as sinuous as cursive, collectively knitted together from an amalgam of an active and energetic today and our institutionalized yesterdays. Time assists in creating an emblematic zoetic organism, folding in on itself over and over as a slow moving lava flow does, pushing it’s way down a mountainside, leaving both hardened, fragmentary scars and supple, enlightened beauty marks in its wake.
Sometimes shit gets crazy, sometimes life is chill. Sometimes we are hurt, sometimes we hurt others. Sometimes we fuck up, sometimes we knock one out of the park. These are the days of our lives as the soap says, and each offers us an opportunity to learn, to grow, to change – to become.
So maybe it’s a good thing when some of our pages come unhinged- the result of a meeting of the minds of the proverbial office supplies. Distended clips are pulled, robust staples yanked, and the anecdotal pages of our experiences – the good, bad, and the ugly – are tossed high into the sky, landing in a fresh order, and combining to create the intricate and beautiful hybrid consequence that is each of us – the cocooned larva, working on getting its wings.
