I don't know about you, but everyone I know has had his or her live take twists and turns they never thought were possible. Even those people, who seemingly have an unerringly accurate trajectory in a certain direction and hit the bulls-eye, have moments when the arrow flies off the mark for a moment or two.
In this way life is messy, it doesn't quite turn out the way you think it will.
The other day I was reading one of the many books I have on interesting and educational activities you can do with your two-year-old. In this particular book, there is section on making messes, which according to the authors is a necessary activity in the development of children because they have a natural affinity for mess making and allowing them to make a mess helps them to develop their creativity.
I am someone who is all for creativity, so, I decided that we would do the finger-painting with pudding activity. I covered the dining room table with wax paper, I wrapped my son up in a mens shirt that stood in for a smock and I prepared two types of pudding, chocolate and vanilla, so he could learn how to mix the two colors while he was making a mess.
He was so excited to paint with pudding, he clapped his hands together splattering pudding all over the table, he made swirls and lines in the pudding and he mixed the colors together. Finally, after quite some time I thought that he had spent his creativity, for that moment anyway.
I walked to the sink to get a sponge to clean up with and in those two seconds I had my back turned, my son's creativity reared its head to say it was still around when he made chocolate pudding fingerprints on our hardwood floor. The trail was there for the world to see, small handprints making their way off the tabletop, down the legs of the table and then circling around the floor. When I turned around and first saw him, he was still in the throes of the crime, the tracks were quickly making their way to the white molding around one of the doors, to get to which the prints would have had to cross the rug and climbed up and over the sofa.
Of course I rushed into action, wiping him and his mitts off before they could make anymore maps in the house. Seeing him make the tracks, which he thought was the greatest thing in the world, made me think that no matter how controlled a mess is, it still can take on a life of its own.
You can never really know what the results of your actions or messes will be, a situation that looks like a real mess may lead into the best circumstances of your life and the reverse is true too.
All any of us can really count on is that life is messy, it's how we react to the messes that counts.
