I'm reading Neil Gaiman's
"The Graveyard Book" currently and it's a great little adventure. The predicament young Bod gets himself into at one point got me thinking. Although it's meant to be a children's book, and in the aforementioned scenario Bod is about 11, both his state of mind as well as his dilemma seem as though they replay themselves throughout life for us all.
Without getting into the details of the book, I'll just say this: We, as humans, often lay elaborate plans, with the best of intentions and the highest of ideals. Once put into play though, they often unravel, disintegrate or go haywire on us. We're often left standing in a pile of debris, usually of our own creation, looking around us, with a large red question mark floating obnoxiously over our heads.
I don't think there's any way to avoid this. It's intrinsic to life that we repeat the pattern. I guess that the point is not to figure out how to break that cycle, but how to better deal with the question mark afterward.
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