A Festive Analogy - 12/9/2009

If I had the ability to come up with insightful, much less clever, analogies, I would be a much better writer than I am now.  But as it stands, you'll have to deal with my present lack of awareness what makes an analogy both interesting and entertaining. . .and listen to me try to elaborate on a thought I had a few days ago.

See, there was this line of white lights I simply NEEDED on my tree this year, since I'm putting up red and white lights and ornaments. . .(the end result is that my tree is the spiciest and angriest Latino Christmas tree our family has ever had).  In any event, the line of white lights was massive. . with no discernible end in sight.  It was a tangled clusterfuck of twists and turns, of knots within other knots which lead to utter confusion and feelings of hopelessness and despair.  And while I knew there was a way out of the mess I had somehow gotten myself in with this line of Christmas lights last year, I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA HOW TO GET MYSELF OUT OF THIS HORRIBLE SITUATION!!!!!

And then I paused and sat down, because I was slightly hungover from my friends bachelor party the night before and it didn't help that untangling wires was making the world spin like record baby, right round. . round round.  I thought that maybe if I plugged it in the lights themselves would reveal the path, illuminating the correct way in which to escape the never-ending labyrinth of carelessness and stupidity that had gotten me to where I was at that moment.  So I plugged it in, and WHAM. . it hit me!  

The lights were beautiful.  Tangled though they truly were, they were gorgeous in and of themselves.  Straightened or not, the lights still served a purpose, they only had to be turned on in order to achieve that purpose.  Perhaps there's a metaphor for our lives in there somewhere.  We spend the majority of our lives trying to find our way out of our debt, out of suffering, out of confusion, uncertainty and misdirection.  We want desperately for things to make sense, for there to be some order and underlying LOGIC behind things.  But perhaps we're missing the point.  

If we stepped back and remembered HOW to look at things,, maybe we could admire the entropy of the universe for how wonderful it really is.  Not as an indication of the non-existence of God, but as a testament to the Divine . .a constant reminder that there is beauty in chaos.  And it was there, in those tangled, frustrating set of Christmas lights that almost gave me a heart attack trying to unravel....I just had to look at them with the lights turned on.