Life is not like a box of chocolates
With a box of chocolates, you can be pretty sure that whatever gets doled out, it’s gonna feature chocolate.
As aphorisms go, the famous line from Forrest Gump isn’t the worst. “My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’” But while there’s a life lesson in there, it’s a chocolate-coated lesson. It’s a sweet and pleasant lesson, not one that stings. It also has the unfortunate attribute of not being entirely true, though there’s still value in the lesson. Sometimes you do know what you’re going to get. Don’t believe me? Find an occupied hornets’ nest and whack it hard with a stick. Or better yet, select a chocolate candy from a Russell Stover chocolates gift box. Is a fair bit of it chocolate? Did we not expect that?
Some readers might remember Sketch Guy. A few years back, a financial planner named Carl Richards had a nice gig at the New York Times as Sketch Guy. Sketch Guy’s schtick was simple. He used a Sharpie to draw a simple sketch on a paper napkin. Usually more diagram or flow chart than sketch, these doodles were to help the reader assimilate the simple lesson Sketch Guy was sharing. Like this one, in which he proclaims that ‘Busy Is Not a Badge of Honor’, especially for creative types. Another, more relevant right now, is Sketch Guy’s NYT work published in January, 2017, about life lessons.
Richards’ entire opening paragraph from that piece:
One day, I imagined that I had a vault where I kept the most valuable lessons of my life. I opened it and was surprised to find it full of my most painful experiences.
There it is: Most painful experiences = Most valuable lessons. There are no Hershey brand Most Painful Experiences. Painful Experiences don’t come coated in Dove Dark Chocolate. In response to painful experiences some of us might reach for a Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate Bar with Whole Hazelnuts, or a whole bag of Hershey Kisses, but, let me say it again—that’s in response to the Painful Experience. The PE—and the lesson one can (should?) take from it—are not chocolate-dipped confections.
No disrespect intended to Forrest or his momma, but life is not really like box of chocolates. If it were, we could be pretty sure that whatever life throws at us next is gonna be at least the equivalent of chocolate-covered. Which can make lots of unpalatable things slightly more tolerable to our taste buds. The universe, however, does not dish out chocolate-covered goodies as some sort of bare minimum door prize just for showing up.
Thomas Hobbes, when he is remembered at all in these days of amusement punctuated by calamity, is most noted for his description of humankind in the native state of the species, before the development of society and decent, law-giving government, in which condition there is naught but “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Great fun he was, Hobbes. All happiness and huzzahs. Always the first to be invited to the party.
He wasn’t wrong, though, or at least not far wrong, which we see when we hold his comment up for examination in the light of the first 198,000 or so of our 200,000 years walking upright and linking syllables together. Many of the religious amongst us shouldn’t be surprised. In the Book of Genesis, those of Judeo-Christian faiths are told that, due to the shenanigans with the apple, humans were kicked out of a garden paradise and cursed, and even “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee….”1 In the next verse we are reminded that “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The First Noble Truth of Buddhism avers that “Life is suffering.” Zoroastrianism looks at this life as a temporary deployment into the war between good and evil—basically, a life at war. In no major religion, as far as I can tell, is there any basic tenet stating, “Life is like a box of chocolates.” However, there is much discussion of pain, suffering, redemption, karma, conflict, evil, and the heartbreak of psoriasis, and how these things are to be dealt with. Oh, and death. That’s a big one. Cormac McCarthy said, “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is.” Enjoyment, happiness, and satisfaction are difficult to find, more difficult to hold, transient, and greatly valued. None are thought more blessed than those who are genuinely content.
We live in a time where, with the aid of telescopes that would make Galileo and Newton stand mute in shock and awe, we can look “out there”, beyond our little rock-and-water planet, even beyond the solar system, across the Milky Way galaxy, and back to what we think is the beginning of time, at least as time, space, and such mean anything in this universe. It often seems that wherever we point those telescopes, we see magnificent sights. Saturn and its rings, the many moons of Jupiter, binary stars circling about each other. The Orion constellation, and there, in Orion’s sword, the Orion Nebula. Or the M55 Star Cluster.
We are very properly amazed by such images, generally thought to be beautiful. (The image of the Orion Nebula is alleged by the good folks at Wikipedia to be “one of the finest images on the English Wikipedia,…” Given that the image is 17 years old and the James Webb Space Telescope is producing images very considerably better than anything Hubble can do [see here for an example], we can expect to be ever more dazzled by starlight for the foreseeable future.) M55 is 17.6 thousand light-years away—for me, about 69 quadrillion morning dog walks away, which means it’s really hard to visit and be back home for lunch. The cluster is about 48 light-years across, and contains something like 270,000 stars.
But it’s what we don’t see we need further reminding of. Those vast distances I just mentioned? They are…exceedingly empty. Filled with damn near nothing. (There are, no doubt, a few photons, gamma rays, and a fair number of neutrinos, etc., etc., sure, but these don’t actually amount to much, being things of Very, Very Little Mass or None at All, and there just isn’t much else. Except for dark matter, possibly. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole.) We are dazzled by the light. What about darkness, that old friend? And nothing. Are we dazzled by large amounts of nothing—if that’s a concept that even makes sense? Isn’t that one concept of Hell? Nothing but nothing, nothing at all, just…nothing…for the rest of time?
So, are these things beautiful? Really? Or are they just…there? Astronomers are working themselves into a tizzy once again over a supernova in its “death throes”. Beautiful death throes? If one takes, say, the explosion of the Trinity test in New Mexico in 1945 as beautiful and magnifies it by billions of billions of billions of times, then it must be billions of billions of billions of times as beautiful, one supposes. If, however, one is on a planet anywhere near (‘near’ being actually a very large volume of space, dramatically exceeding the size of our solar system by something like a thousand times) that exploding supernova, then ‘beautiful’ might not be the word one would be searching for. Not that one would be doing much searching, having just been instantaneously annihilated, but, well, one gets the drift.
To bring the scale of things under consideration back to something we can maybe actually get a mental grasp of, let’s consider Morocco. Three days ago, a strong earthquake occurred in the Atlas Mountains of that nation. According to the New York Times a few hours ago, the death toll stood at 2497, with rescue efforts, hobbled and made miniscule by the size of the disaster, nowhere near complete. The number of dead and wounded, the number of families devastated; the simple, massive, extremely painful human toll, will continue to grow. To call such a life experience beautiful would be an obscenity. And let me correct myself: No, I don’t think those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced such a disaster can really get a hold of it all with our minds.
A favorite film of mine is the 1997 Italian movie Life is Beautiful, starring and directed by Roberto Benigni, released to much acclaim in the US in ‘98, winning three Academy Awards (Best Foreign Film, Best Actor [Benigni], and Best Musical Score [Nicola Piovani]) and a Cannes Grand Prix. Actor/comedian Benigni plays a good-hearted Jewish waiter of modest means who seeks to open a bookstore in an Italian villag, meanwhile falling in love with the woman (Dora, a teacher in the village school) we come to know primarily by what he calls her: la principessa. He steals her away from the village mean-hearted bureaucrat as WWII is getting started. They marry, and the Nazis come to occupy the village, where Guido (Benigni) and Dora live with Guido’s uncle, and have a pre-K-aged son, Joshua. Guido is seen to be always protective of his son, especially so when it comes to dealing with the day-to-day discrimination, depredations, and humiliations the Nazis and the local Fascisti heap on the Jews.
Precocious Joshua, already reading, asks his always-clowning father why a shop has a sign on the door: Jews and Dogs Forbidden. “Because,” Guido replies, “they just don’t want them in there. Everybody does it. Just yesterday I was with a Spanish friend and his camel, and we couldn’t get a coffee, because they wouldn’t allow Spaniards and camels in the café. When we have our bookshop, we’ll do it, too. What animal do you not like?” “Spiders.” “Okay then, we won’t allow spiders in the shop. And I am really tired of the Visigoths. So we won’t allow them, either. No spiders, no Visigoths.”
When danger appears, Guido turns things into a skit or a game. When the family are taken by the Nazis to a concentration camp, he fabricates an elaborate story-and-game for his son, telling him if they win, they’ll get a real tank!
Life is not beautiful for Jews in Nazi-occupied Italy, or in the camps. But Guido tries hard to make it seem, if not beautiful, at least not dangerous or deadly. And he sprinkles little bits of love and beauty about when he can, even in the camp, where horrors abound, and death comes even for the laugh-giver. But there is a simple, beautiful ending.
Another film that is a favorite of many is the Jimmy Stewart/Donna Reed/Frank Capra It’s a Wonderful Life, number twenty on the American Film Institute’s list of all-time best American movies, and their top-ranking inspirational film of all time, three spots ahead of Rocky, and four ahead of another Stewart picture, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It is also number 8 on their list of best love stories. Life is beautiful, and it’s wonderful, too.
I will only briefly dish up the plot of Wonderful Life here, on the assumption that most everyone knows how dreamer George Bailey gets trapped into running the family’s ol’ building-and-loan in the Bailey hometown of Bedford Falls, where he dishes up fairness and kindness in opposition to the cold-hearted and greedy town banker (and building-and-loan board member) Henry Potter, only for the building-and-loan to be pushed into failure by a bank run. George becomes so despondent that he intends to take his own life, but his attempt is diverted by an intervening angel, who then grants George the opportunity to see what would happen to the lovely town if George were to kill himself. Instead of a charming, wholesome town, Bedford Falls becomes a row of saloons, sex shops, gambling, and worse. By changing his mind and working in an effort to overcome the building-and-loan’s failure, George inspires the good people of the town to come together with donations to keep it afloat, whence the town itself is also saved. All because a good man tried to do good for his friends and neighbors, who returned the favor.
Our favorite stories, the ones that get called ‘beautiful’, feature redemption, and a triumph of something we call good. But not all stories get to present us with these. Sometimes the prodigal son doesn’t return at all. Sometimes the bad guys do win, the cancer doesn’t respond to treatment, the business fails again, and the dog, the goldfish, and one’s dreams all die.
For most of human existence, our ancestors lived with closer views and more direct knowledge of nature’s grosser ways than do we who are now generally removed from “nature, red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson put it. Even when illness, pain, violence and death were only being delivered to other than human-kind, they were close. The falcon dispatched the hare; a snake made lunch of that lizard; locusts ravaged fields and crops; disease felled those it would, from tigers to trees. When it wasn’t one living thing taking the necessities of life from another, the elements could do horrible things. The earth might this day quake, some other day slide under a torrential rain. The winds of a storm might rip up roofs and trees or strip all warmth. Fire might rush about and blacken the world.
Life ain’t always beautiful.
In the face of events not beautiful, we can choose how we wish to be, think, and act. It has been said that it’s not the getting knocked down that matters—we all get knocked down, though, granted, some more than others—it’s the getting back up. Sometimes the weather simply won’t allow a try for the summit. So we await another opportunity. The crew of Apollo 13 are rightly lauded not because they completed their mission—they never got to land on the Moon—but because they worked together and overcame life-threatening obstacles on their spacecraft a couple hundred thousand miles from our home planet.
In sports, some like to refer to second place as “the first loser”. The Tokyo Olympics men’s 400 meter hurdles finals was a remarkable race. Karsten Warholm of Norway held the world record going into the final at 46.70 seconds. He and Rai Benjamin of the U.S. were thought to perhaps be able to challenge that record. Benjamin produced an amazing run, smashing the world record with a time of 46.10 seconds. Warholm? He broke the record, too—smashing it even more thoroughly than did Benjamin, running an astounding 45.94 sec for the race. Third-place went to Alison Dos Santos of Brazil, who by only 0.02 seconds failed to break the world record, running 46.72, which was of course a new personal best and Brazilian national record. Calling Benjamin and Dos Santos “first and second losers” surely cannot be appropriate. Both performed extremely well—better than they ever had before—and broke records in doing so. They just happened to be in the same race with Karsten Warholm, who ran just a little faster yet. Can we not celebrate all three? Perhaps their performances were actually beautiful?
The greatest beauty in human lives doesn’t come, however, in chasing after glory or gold. It comes in the love of one of us for another. The devotion of an exhausted parent making breakfast for the kids before school is beautiful. A military spouse holding down a job and doing a single-parent impersonation with two children in a rental house with lousy plumbing, a thousand miles from family, while the other half is deployed to some place neither can pronounce. The old woman who parked her Buick Regal outside the grocery store and got out and limped around the car and opened the door for her husband, who slowly, gingerly, awkwardly pulled himself out of the passenger and grasped the frame of the walker his wife had retrieved from the back seat. After he steadied himself, she leaned in to help him turn. Before he did so, he reached up and patted her arm, then kissed her on the cheek. Both, beautiful.
There are more stories like this, and we should be celebrating them all. Life is not like a box of cherries, and it ain’t always beautiful. But it can be a beautiful ride, if we work at it, work together, love one another. Life doesn’t come to us beautiful. But we can choose to make it so.
And in conclusion, another little bit from Tennyson, again from his In Memoriam: A.H.H.
Behold! we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
Genesis 3: 17-18, King James Version.
o my
sublime again
this one is poetry
you reach the deep place inside
where love is grown