Do you sometimes feel like a tangled plate of spaghetti and other times feel like a weaved carpet. If you literary think of the feelings like the two examples, you instantly have “delicious” and “beautiful” in your mind or a total confused, marshy with no clear directions feeling. I like the fact that i can use these examples to bring out the deeper meaning of our feelings. It’s more about attitude. More like the mostly used “half glass full or empty theory”.
A friend and I had coffee recently and we were catching up on life. Like where are you with? What’s happening and all. It’s during such conversations you sometimes realize that life has been so good than you thought and also get to identify that which has been nagging you and you could not put a finger to it. As we were talking, i made a reference to a plate of spaghetti. Have you looked at one closely? A plate of spaghetti is a plate full of nutrients, looks appetizing, smells so good and just screams – “eat me now”. The spaghetti strands also look so confused, with no directions, intertwined and kind of forced to be together. You cannot tell where each strand of spaghetti begins and ends if you don’t pull it out individually. We looked at each other and said, yes, that is so true. We were both feeling “spaghetti” in our own different ways. You can actually use a plate of spaghetti to describe two different feelings.
The first scenario is when you look at the plate and it’s beautiful, delicious, appetizing, smells so good and screams “eat me”. That is how we look to the world. We are perfect and beautiful, full of hope to the eyes of others and an envy to many. The second scenario is when the plate filled with these confused strands of spaghetti, intertwined with no direction. That is mostly how we feel inside. The truth is, we are both of the scenario at different times and all we need to do is pull a strand at a time, identifying it and give it direction. The spaghetti strands represent our thoughts, our obstacles, our challenges, our decision making process, our solving problems skills. By pulling each one of the strands, you identify those things one by one and address them. By the time our coffee was done, three hours later ;), we had helped each other appreciate where we are and identify those areas that needed our attention. I wonder how this world would be without a sister- aah! (Sigh with a huge smile).
Then i went home and thought of a carpet and tried to fit it to the above analogy. A carpet is weaved when spaghetti are cooked. Threads, colours and a pattern are carefully selected. Someone then seats down and puts each thread to it’s right place tightly weaving and forming a beautiful pattern. Gradually you have a firm, hard, stable, even, beautiful piece of so many threads of different colours intertwined together. Before the spaghetti are cooked, they are a bunch of long, straight hard, neat sticks. To bring out the good in them, they have to be cooked to get them soft and then served on a plate looking so confused but very delicious. On the other hand, the carpet is not weaved in a few minutes. There is plenty of work to make as beautiful, firm and durable as possible carpet.
I realized that we all have to feel like a spaghetti to be able to weave our lives into a beautiful carpet. I also realized that all this helps to build us to something better every time. So any time you feel meeh… or like a plate of spaghetti, just know your opportunity to become a beautiful carpet is ripe. Pick your strands, identify the strong ones, colour them, come up with a pattern (plan) and begin to weave your carpet.
Life if good.
Dedicated to my dear friend Wangeci from Gachungua.
