Playdough

So many colors and so many shapes to make.  Sitting there at your table alone or perhaps with your siblings or friends, you can make anything, do anything, be anything.  When you're young, you can mold your future into anything you want it to be.

And then you grow up.  Playdough is a fond memory, perhaps one you choose to pass onto your own children, but its not something for you anymore.  Your life is what you've made it.  The choices you've made when you were younger seem to shape who you are today.  You can still make tweaks, minor corrections, but the mold's already set.  The playdough's been left out for days, weeks, months, even years without an intervention.  It is what it is, and it feels like there's very little you can do about it now.

What if you want to start over, to begin again.  Is your only choice to give fresh dough to the future generation, to those who come after you.  Is your future really already hard and fast, determined by all that's led up to this point without much room for growth.

Maybe you want to go back to just playing with playdough again.  Maybe you want to crush what you are, start with a fresh ball, use a different color.  Maybe you want your future to once again be undecided, like when you were young, like when you were too young to worry about your future at all.  Can you do that?

It isn't fair really... when you're shaping your life, molding it into what it is to become, you don't really appreciate it, may not even realize what you've doing.  You've always been able to reshape it before, to recreate it, to try a different mold.  And then one day you realized you'd forgotten what you were doing.  You'd let it set out for those days or weeks or months or even years and its hardened.  Is there no going back?  Now that you actually realize what you've done, are you stuck with what you created back when you didn't even know what you were doing?

Watching the new children play gives you hope.  Can you pass onto them the lessons you didn't learn before it was too late?  Will they even listen?  Didn't the adults in your life try to do the same thing with you when you were young?  Did you listen?

Maybe you can start all over, maybe you can't, but there's always playdough out there somewhere, wanting to be formed into something beautiful, even if its not just your own.