| “Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, ‘You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.’ Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.” (Bill Bryson)
It’s amazing what never occurs to us. For example. I grew up enjoying the surf of Hawaii, yet it never occurred to me to find any meaning in it. Until I thought about blue bubblefish. |
Everything in Hawaii makes it paradise…except blue bubblefish.
Blue bubblefish are a jelly fish you occasionally find in the surf: a transparent blue bubble head, attached to a long tail that resembles skinny seaweed. (Except that seaweed doesn’t hurt when it touches you!) Blue bubblefish STING. And over the course of my life, I’ve been stung a few times.
The first time I got stung by a blue bubblefish, it hurt! I couldn’t recall ever feeling anything like it. I went in the house, applied meat tenderizer to the sting (it was supposed to help, but I don’t remember that it did) and stayed inside the rest of the afternoon. The second time I was stung, I went inside for a little while, but returned to the beach later that day. The third time I got stung, I flipped the bubblefish onto the beach and popped it, so it wouldn’t hurt me or anyone else again. The final time I got stung, I uncurled the bubble fish tail from around my arm, threw the fish as far away from me as I could–but kept swimming. It turns out, each time I got stung, I was a little bit stronger and able to deal with it.
As I battled the occasional bubblefish in the summertime in Hawaii, I didn’t think much beyond the experience that interrupted my boogie boarding. But now I see that life is kind of like that.
Life is a beach. The unexpected things that come into our lives are blue bubblefish. They “interrupt” our life experience, they hurt, they aren’t “fun.” In fact, sometimes the pain they cause can be downright miserable. However, the hard and painful experiences can make us stronger each time we overcome them until one day, we keep swimming despite the pain. Eventually, we don’t notice them any more.
Our challenge is to keep ourselves floating, or at least on the beach, until that time. We can’t quit. We can’t go into the house, nurse our wound and abandon boogie boarding for the rest of the day or our life.
We have to remember that, “Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.” (Lance Armstrong)
