What do you do?
First, you try to hold as many as you can in your hands and you start up the hill. But you have really tiny hands and inevitably after a few steps you drop one. Luckily it landed on a particularly soft piece of grass and rolled down to the bottom of the hill. It was a pretty important egg, and you weren't that far up the hill, so you go back to get it and start up the hill again.
You're a little more tired because you've already walked this part of the hill once, but you keep going. It's still difficult to hold the eggs, and sometimes you bobble them. A couple of times you drop one and it cracks a little, but doesn't roll, and you're able to pick it up and continue on. Every once and awhile when the eggs roll, you chase after them and you're able to catch up before they get all the way to the bottom of the hill... but then you have to climb that part of the hill again.
Along the way you find a new egg or two, and they seem like eggs you'd like to have so you pick them up, even though you're having trouble holding the ones you already have. You get a little smarter and try pulling up the hem of your shirt and holding the eggs in a make-shift pouch of sorts. This is working pretty well, but even though you were initially careful with the eggs, the further you get up the hill, the more confident you become in your shirt pouch and forget that the eggs can still break if you don't hold onto the hem just right.
And then you trip. And fall. And the eggs scatter. Some crack, some roll, some break and splatter all over the front of your shirt. And there you are, halfway up a hill with half your eggs broken or smeared all over you, the other half out of your reach at the bottom of the hill. After you spend some time mourning the loss of your eggs, beating yourself up for being so careless, and after a fleeting moment in which you consider the idea of continuing up the hill without the ones you can't reach, you decide to go back down the hill and try to find the most important eggs.
Once you're back at the bottom of the hill you find yourself with far fewer eggs than you had at the start and decide that maybe climbing the hill isn't worth losing the few eggs you've got left. Maybe you can just hang out at the bottom of the hill and hold your eggs and that's good enough. Maybe the top of the hill is overrated. So you sit and hold your eggs and you watch other people climb the hill.
After awhile you get sick of watching people climb the hill, and you really want to give it another try, but you don't want to lose your eggs again. You actually liked climbing the hill the first time, even though it was difficult, and it would be really nice to get to the top. You start to think that maybe along the way you'll be able to replace some of the eggs you lost. But you're going to need a strategy this time. You can't just try to hold onto all the eggs and expect to not drop them again.
A basket. You need a basket for the eggs. Something big, and supportive, with a good structure. Something that won't let you down like your hands and your shirt did. If you don't have to do it all on your own the eggs will be so much easier to carry. Then you find a basket that seems to meet all the criteria and add in your few precious eggs and start back up the hill once more.
The climb is difficult, like it was before, but the eggs are safe in the basket. You're making great progress up the hill, finding more eggs, adding them to the basket. Never dropping one. Even when you switch out your basket for a different one for a little while and take a different trail up the hill - leaving a few of those eggs behind - you and the eggs are still doing okay.
After awhile you backtrack to the first basket and head up the original path again, but the basket you left behind isn't quite the same as when you left it and when you add back in all the eggs you don't notice that the bottom has become a little worn and the weave is not as tight as it used to be. But you really want the basket to be as strong as you remember it and as you try to make your way up the hill on the old path, you're finding the climb much more difficult than you remember it being.
Wasn't this easier before? Wasn't carrying your eggs in this basket all that you needed before to get up the hill with the eggs intact? Then the unthinkable happens. The bottom falls out of the basket. There you are again with your eggs on the ground. Cracked. Broken. Splattered. Rolling away from you.
They warn you not to put all your eggs in one basket.
So, what do you do when the basket breaks?
No comments:
Post a Comment