But, What Is It?

"It's an ashtray."  

Back in the day it used to be common for children to give their parents gifts related to smoking.  Many ceramic or metal-shop projects ended up being
 gifted as ashtrays.  Making a vase tall and slender, with thin walls, takes a whole lot more skill than making a short, squat, thick, kind of saucer-ish thing.  That dent in the rim of a roundish piece of metal, that was once destined to become a cup, looks a lot like a place to park a cigarette.  There comes a time when increased work isn't adding to its cup-ish-ness, or vase-like quality.  At some point the answer to the question,

"What is it?"

became,

"It's an ashtray."

That wasn't what I wanted it to be.  It's not  what I want, but it has to be something, so . . .

Solomon observed that "Time and Chance happens to all."  I would add to the mix, skill, talent, planning, diligence, and/or lack of all the above.  From time to time I work with wood.  Sometimes a  project gets modified because of a previously unseen blemish in the wood.  

"Why did you make that that way?"

"Because a worm bored into a tree fifty years ago."

Improv-comics, moms, politicians, and football coaches all need that if-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemonade skill.  If you let those adaptive concepts get out of hand, however, you end up--well--messed up.  We might praise a twelve-year-old for somewhat salvaging a project-gone-bad.  The C- for the "ashtray" is better than a 0 for a no-show.  When a life, or an important institution morphs into the human equivalent of a waste container for tobacco ash it is tragic.

I don't want to stand before the Lord and say about what I've done with my life, "I guess, Lord, it turned out to be an ashtray."

We aren't done yet.  Stay tuned.

It's STTA.