In a recent post, we talked about the marble run that my son and I love to play together. There are so many fun varieties of this game. The one my son has is fairly straightforward, but some have magnetic connections or some are designed for much younger children . Depending on your goal, there are so many great options available.
Therein lies another lesson from the marble run. The basic goal is to get the marble from point A to point B without flying off the track or getting stuck. How you do it is up to you. More often than not, we make a mess out of our track. We add complications. We want to see the marble do something fun like go around a spiraling bridge from one tower to the next and somehow still end up in the tray at the bottom. We impose new challenges and secondary objectives on the marble simply because it would be boring if we didn’t.
That’s kind of how it goes for everything else, too, right? All you have to do is go to work and complete the tasks you are given so you can get paid. Instead, we find ourselves thinking of ways to make it better or joining committees to help with various projects. We sign up for professional development courses – for what? Because doing the same boring old job day in and day out would drain the life right out of us. We find ways to improve our ability to do the work so that we can produce a better product.
In high school and college, very few people make it without some type of extracurricular activity. Few people attend church without trying out a new Sunday School class or signing up to help with Vacation Bible School. Most of us can’t read a book or watch a tv show or a movie without trying to figure out how it ends before we get to the end.
If you are engaged in the life you live, then you care about the experience. You look for new ways to make life interesting because just trying to make it to the end isn’t enjoyable. Sometimes the complications we encounter aren’t what we hoped for, and other times the enhancement is exactly what we planned. Either way, those twists, and turns are part of the track we all race down. If your track isn’t giving you the run you want to look back on when the marble stops, then maybe you need to add some magnets.