Life is a Rubber Band Ball
You can only do so many things with your time. You can walk, you can watch, you can work. But whatever it is, you live your life through what you do. So believe that what you do matters, and there’s a chance it just might. Commitment to an idea is the most beautiful thing a mind can do. The idea can be anything: a person, a purpose, a project. Life is what you build. Understanding that simple truth is a powerful thing. And when you look at your life in all its hours and see the time and the promise for what it is, you will be transfixed.
A moment is nothing. Just a piece of life that bends and slips away. A moment is red. It’s a loop, with no start and no end. It’s small, but you can stretch it. Roll it between your fingers. It might break if you pull too hard. Or fly away like a slingshot if you let go. A moment is almost nothing.
It might snap or fly or fall to the ground with the crumbs and the dirt, but that moment is a piece of a life. You can grab it. Turn the thing on itself, twisting one side around the corner of another in a knot of effort and confusion. Rolling together the space between breaths until they’re more than a gasp and less than a shout. It’s still not much. Just a little effort spent on a thought at the edge of what could be. But the loop of the moment is changed now. It has an edge. It’s a little red ball in the palm of your hand.
Then you add the next moment to the first. Tying the loose band around the vague shape. It’s growing. One small effort becomes the base for the next. You keep adding. More and more. It’s only a few moments now, but the coil of red is very real. You can hold it between your thumb and index finger like a gum ball. But you don’t bite. It’s still small enough to roll behind the fridge or under the couch. Easy to lose or forget. So you keep going. Building. Turning fleeting seconds to this thing that you’ve begun. You can bounce it off the ground now. It’s reddish pink, lumpy and imperfect. No one moment exactly the same shape or color as the next. But together they are clear even in their imperfection. Together they are something. Misshapen but always changing. It’s round, the size of a fist. It could be a heart. And now you think of it beating, pulsing all its own. Growing bigger as you add moments of your life to the idea of how you want to spend them.
You spin it in the air. Friends can see it, hold the moments in their own hands. They don’t believe it.
“What’s on the inside?” they say, “How did you start?”
“There’s nothing on the inside,” you say, “It’s all just rubber bands.”
They smile and toss it back. You feel the weight in your hand. It’s almost a pound now. As heavy as a book. How big could it be? How much could you build? A house? A farm? Or maybe more. You see it now, the long arc of red moments stretching across other moments. They’re longer than your arms, far farther than you ever thought they could reach. They go for miles and miles. A great red thing, always growing, beating with life as wide as the sky. You can’t forget it now. The burning image of what could be. The idea is too big. All those moments, together they could block out the sun. You can’t rest. Can’t stop stretching one minute around the next. All because you need to know. What could you make with the moments of a life?
