Along the Marble Track, Part 1 — Getting There is the Fun Part
Embracing the Journey: Discovering Joy in Life’s Twists, Turns, and Fun Moments Along the Marble Track
My son loves video games, but we regularly need to take breaks from the screen and play something else. He has a mountain of toys, but one of his favorite things to play with is his marble run.
It’s also one of my favorite things to play with him. I don’t have the mind of an architect, and my brain doesn’t see systems and functions the way that an engineer does. For me, it’s a great challenge to build something that he will enjoy but also that works like it’s supposed to. There are loops and bridges. There are curves and spinning pinwheels. After trying to help my son make the coolest marble track yet while also explaining to him why structural support is necessary, I can finally see what made all that math worthwhile to the people who graduated with engineering degrees.
There’s one other thing I can see clearly. The purpose of the marble run is simply to move the ball from the starting point to the ending point. That’s it. There is nothing of significance about getting a marble from point A to point B. No matter how simple that task sounds, we never build straight tracks. We always challenge ourselves to put in all the coolest features, and often this causes the marble to fail to reach its destination.
However, when we succeed in making the marble ride the tightest curve or go up and over the bridge and through the pinwheel pass, it is worth every unsuccessful attempt. We are always happy when the marble makes it to its final destination safely, but we have never been satisfied with a boring track.
Our lives are a little bit like that, and I only recently figured this out. When I entered graduate school, I knew that I wanted to be a City Manager by the time I was 30. I took the right classes, got the right jobs along the way, and I accepted my first City Administrator job just a few months before I turned 30. In my rush to get to the destination, I didn’t pay attention to all the exciting twists and turns along the way. I probably missed a bunch of fun and interesting things that I should have been more open to, but I was more worried about the goal than the game.
It doesn’t take long for the marble to get from start to finish, and, relatively speaking, it doesn’t take long for you and me to go from birth to death. Be open to the loops and the flips and all the fun stuff along the way. That’s what makes life fun.
Originally published at https://darrekferrell.com on July 17, 2023.
