flying kites...
When I was a kid, my brother and I went through a kite-making phase. Every weekend, we'd make monstrous contraptions out of paper, barbecue sticks, glue and whatever was around. My brother was a conceptual genius even then, and he could design all sorts of things that I couldn't. I stuck to the original diamond-shaped kite with a bit of string attached at the end. One thing remained constant though, we could never make them fly. Never. Not once. Well there was a time my nephew hoisted his kite high enough to almost tangle with the electric cables running in front of our houses and that scared us all to pieces because we'd heard stories of kids getting electrocuted to death that way. It could've been that incident or something else maybe, but we were eventually cured of that kite-making mania.
Now that I'm older, I know that the reason behind those failures to launch were probably that the materials that were too heavy and the designs that were not conducive to flying at all. Back then, I thought if you had a kite that looked like a kite, if there was enough of a breeze, and if you threw your kite high enough and hard enough, then it would fly like those pictures I would see in books, or in those television commercials. I didn't know about physics then, I simply though if I kept trying to throw it high enough, it would eventually fly. But they never did.
Wishes are kites that we throw with our minds and our hearts. Some are like those in those Bear Brand commercials, they are huge and it looks impossible for them to lift even an inch above the ground, but they soar effortlessly because the person who made them understood how to build and support them. Some are like those I used to make as a child, they look deceptively simple and textbook-perfect but they get bogged down by heavy sticks, heavy paper and lumpy glue spilled all over the corners so that they either crash back down to the ground or worse, get entangled in electrical wires and send us frying to our deaths (although I never did bother to find out if this can actually happen).
Some dreams we wish for to come true so hard we wonder why heaven hasn't collapsed from all our begging. We believe with all our hearts that IT is EXACTLY what we want, that it's the perfect thing for us and that we will never be truly happy if we don't get our wish. But no matter how hard you try, no matter how fervently you wish, your dream remains a dream. There are those times though, when you don't even dare to wish. You just plod on and do all the things you are supposed to do and sometimes you wonder if what you're doing makes any impact on anyone or anything at all. Then all of a sudden, all your cumulative effort just pops up whole and beautiful in front of you and your wish comes true without even your having made it.
Some things that you will wish for for years will never come true. Some fleeting thoughts that occupy you for about ten seconds become the very things that make your life worth living. Sometimes what you are convinced of being perfect for you, the absolute best that you could ever want for yourself, just passes you by with hardly a glance. You mourn and you bitch but one day you wake up and something even better than your expectations has come your way.
I've thrown dozens of kites that never flew and I've cried over wishes that I wanted and never got. But for now, I'll console myself in thinking that for every opportunity and for every person I missed, there will be something and someone right that will come along. Things and people I won't have to close my eyes to wish for because I could keep them open and see them right in front of me.
Now that I'm older, I know that the reason behind those failures to launch were probably that the materials that were too heavy and the designs that were not conducive to flying at all. Back then, I thought if you had a kite that looked like a kite, if there was enough of a breeze, and if you threw your kite high enough and hard enough, then it would fly like those pictures I would see in books, or in those television commercials. I didn't know about physics then, I simply though if I kept trying to throw it high enough, it would eventually fly. But they never did.
Wishes are kites that we throw with our minds and our hearts. Some are like those in those Bear Brand commercials, they are huge and it looks impossible for them to lift even an inch above the ground, but they soar effortlessly because the person who made them understood how to build and support them. Some are like those I used to make as a child, they look deceptively simple and textbook-perfect but they get bogged down by heavy sticks, heavy paper and lumpy glue spilled all over the corners so that they either crash back down to the ground or worse, get entangled in electrical wires and send us frying to our deaths (although I never did bother to find out if this can actually happen).
Some dreams we wish for to come true so hard we wonder why heaven hasn't collapsed from all our begging. We believe with all our hearts that IT is EXACTLY what we want, that it's the perfect thing for us and that we will never be truly happy if we don't get our wish. But no matter how hard you try, no matter how fervently you wish, your dream remains a dream. There are those times though, when you don't even dare to wish. You just plod on and do all the things you are supposed to do and sometimes you wonder if what you're doing makes any impact on anyone or anything at all. Then all of a sudden, all your cumulative effort just pops up whole and beautiful in front of you and your wish comes true without even your having made it.
Some things that you will wish for for years will never come true. Some fleeting thoughts that occupy you for about ten seconds become the very things that make your life worth living. Sometimes what you are convinced of being perfect for you, the absolute best that you could ever want for yourself, just passes you by with hardly a glance. You mourn and you bitch but one day you wake up and something even better than your expectations has come your way.
I've thrown dozens of kites that never flew and I've cried over wishes that I wanted and never got. But for now, I'll console myself in thinking that for every opportunity and for every person I missed, there will be something and someone right that will come along. Things and people I won't have to close my eyes to wish for because I could keep them open and see them right in front of me.