"What the hell are you looking at? Like this has never happened to you?"
A smiling baby often leaves me ruminating upon how quickly my son is growing up, which in turn makes me yearn for the days when I could just hold him and be the center of his world.
And then there are times when enlightenment comes through less obvious avenues. Like today, for example. Today I was feeling a bit lazy, as Tom and I had worked out pretty hard and I had just finished cooking my favorite ziti for some friends who will be joining us tonight for dinner. I knew I should vacuum, but I was tired. Thank goodness for Zumba, our new robot friend and vacuum cleaner.
As I watched him roam around the first floor of our house, I was impressed. This little guy just goes and goes, and then at some point, he decides he's done enough and returns to his battery charger, ready to juice up for another day. It's impressive. He's got gumption. But then I saw something a little disturbing: Zumba can get himself into bad situations, and spend an enormous amount of energy expending efforts to get himself out, only to get right back into them. To wit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvvgWLBCRyw
It's both endearing and somewhat disheartening, isn't it? He gets himself stuck under the table, and through a long series of trial and error approaches at getting out, he finally makes it past the chairs and back into the freedom that is the rest of the open kitchen. And what does he do? He goes right back in there. In sum, he's a tenacious little fucker, but he's stupid, and continues to make bad choices even after spending considerable effort to get out of the last bad decision he made. Does that remind you of anyone? Because it reminds me of myself in years gone by, and a few other people as well.
As I found myself tempted to move the chairs to help Zumba out of the mess he had created for himself, I realized that this was not the thing to do. Like a child, Zumba was learning an important lesson about life, and hopefully it was being programmed into his microchip, or whatever serves as a robot vacuum's intelligence center, so that in the future he could navigate the table and chairs more successfully.
"Isn't that interesting, Tom?" I said, happy to share my epiphany with my husband. "He's working so hard to get out from under the table, just to go right back in. It's inspirational and frustrating all at the same time. It's like raising children or becoming a more self-realized person, isn't it?"
"Robin, it's a vacuum cleaner." Clearly he wasn't getting it.
"I know, but it's one of those, what do you call it, analogies! The vacuum is an analogy for all of us who struggle to make good choices, redeem ourselves when we make bad ones, and avoid screwing up in the future." I was convinced I was onto something. Something worth blogging about, which is a pretty big damn deal, frankly.
"I think you mean metaphor," he snorted, and gave me a pat on the back. "Maybe you should lie down for a while."
They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time. If we can teach ourselves, and our children, how to avoid returning again and again to places that don't work for us, I think life would be much more serene.
I, for one, am not going to Ben and Jerry's anymore. Well, maybe tomorrow, but not after that.
2 comments:
My friend Sarah, a truly bad housekeeper, got a Zumba, thinking it would bail her out of the mountain of housework, and managed to lose it underneath clutter. I think that's maybe one of those irony-things.
It's a metaphor, of course. And a trenchant observation. Too bad it's lost on Zumba, whose ant-like labors are the sole reason for his meager existence. Offering him insight would be like offering him a martini; it would only fry his little circuits.
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