Louise's Utopia: Life's Shavings

I like the picture of the colored pencil shavings that I posted for this blog. All the bright colors and different shapes and textures. It looks distinct and interesting, it reminds me of a metaphor for our lives, how things eventually add up, as we live from year to year. So many moments in our lives all piled up in somewhat of a heap. The endless ways we grow, learn, and perhaps fail, and yes sometimes even succeed. Life seems so volatile, changing from minute to minute, a breath sometimes is all that it takes for the discomfort of change. As the minutes of our lives tick forward, they seemingly create a mound of different metaphorical shapes, sizes, and colors. It may seem to many of us that our past is the enemy, it keeps us chained to it. We are always dreaming up ways things could have been different if only this or that had happened. Perhaps things may have happened in another way, but perhaps we would have chosen the same trials and made the same choices. We vainly waste our time wishing we could brush aside this or that shaving from the pile and throw it away. Perhaps it filled too large a place in our hearts or too small and we suffer the loss, we suffer as the pieces of our pencil are shaven away by life-sharpening blades. Things we have accomplished may also stand out in our minds as achievements, that we proudly pat ourselves on the back for attaining, or others give us the ol' pat on the back as if somehow they are wise enough to judge what we have done. We do not always know why certain events unfold in our lives, sometimes we do not choose them and they are imposed on us. Anyway they happen, they form the mountain of shavings, we call life. We tend to believe the things that made us happy in the past or the times that made us feel good were the important events. I believe only God sorts through our time wisely and with love. He heals us, picks us up, and brings about the good originally He intended for us. God, mysteriously makes sense out of hard days and whittles us into beautiful mounds of shavings, metaphorically, of course, we are not wood shavings from a pencil. We can transform our life into an interesting picture though, like the one above. We are a beautiful image that needs to be sculpted by someone greater than ourselves someone with a sharpener that fits our mold. It is good to admit to each other that we all are flawed and need to help one another through our shortcomings. A perfect picture depends on many things, like background light, the time of day, the amount of light, etc. We strive for these sorts of conditions in our lives too, but we sometimes fall short of attempting to grasp them. We can help each other stay on track. Metaphorically, being colored pencils, after many shavings are sharpened off us, we will be a smaller size, hopefully with fewer troubles. The exciting news is we will still all have the beautiful colors that make us who we are! My advice is to keep making the shavings of life fall around you, one day they all will amount to something wonderful, you! Let me know what you think!