Marbles and Chaos Theory

If you find yourself with a few minutes to spare have a look see at how marbles are made on YouTube. It's quite cool to watch what it takes to make these little works of art that we used, as kids, literally throw away. Winging them at our friends and enemies alike when pissed at them. Of course, playing marbles, that silly and beautiful game that seemed to have rules that changed with the passing of the sun was the point of marbles. That and collecting them for their implied value.

I don't remember all the terms and what each marble could and could not do. Between cat's eyes and aggies and everything else that might have made sense at the time the basic principle was to shoot your opponents marbles with your marbles to get them out of the ring. Down on all fours, one eye closed, tongue hanging out in concentration and a wing and a prayer on your shot. It was a great afternoon diversion that, like golf, was both fun and frustrating as hell.

Taking your little colourful sphere and hoping that your aim was true was only half the battle....chaos theory was the rest. At least my version of it. Playing marbles on a polished perfectly flat surface will offer you better chances of success as the path to your opponents marble is less affected by changes in circumstances. The pavement in front of our house growing up was far from flat and perfectly even. Imperfections, both tiny and not, invariably had an affect on the trajectory of that marble. My aim might have been true but there were other factors at play here.

Kind of like life. How often do we feel like we're in control of our lives, motoring along, firing on all cylinders and BAM!!!! So much for the easy road eh. You simply don't know what is coming down the mountain at you at any given time...shit, this blog exists because of that. Everything was going great back in December of 2015 when that question was asked "Do you smoke?" Fuck Cancer by the way. A change in circumstances is what we are dealing with, a new reality to consider and react to.

If life is a crap shoot, then that moment the dice are released, when anything can and usually does happen, the bets should be off the table as there is way too much at stake, but of course that is precisely when the bets are down...it's called gambling after all. See the conundrum? Subscribe to whatever you want to believe in, whatever brings you comfort and joy. In the end though, whatever is going to happen is what your reality will become. It is what it is, as they say...fuck I hate that saying, going to have to stop using it.

Despite the imperfections of my playing field I got pretty good at marbles. Overcoming the surrounding circumstances often enough that I would carry a pretty good collection of vanquished marbles. The jury is still out on real life but I feel confident in saying that at the end of it all I'll be pretty happy with my bag of marbles.

Ciao
D