Juggling Eggs

My little nugget of wisdom for today was given to me through a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip.  Calvin, a cynical, suburban six-year-old with the mind of a future philosopher opens the cartoon by carrying in a carton of eggs and announcing that he wishes to juggle them.  His stuffed tiger, Hobbes, brought to life through Calvin's imagination offers concern, but Calvin is persistent saying, "its a metaphor for life Hobbes!"  Unfortunately, like life, his endeavor doesn't turn out the way he had expected.  Anyway, see for yourself...

The theme of my Composition class this semester is persistence.  My professor likes to call it "mental toughness," which sounds much more dramatic and impressive.  I think mental toughness is a vital quality for anyone who wants to be successful at anything whether its a college, a career, or juggling eggs.  If you give up on the first try, you'll never know if you can handle it.  OK, so maybe you don't have to try juggling eggs, but as Calvin so wisely points out, it can serve as a metaphor for the more important things.  My parents have refereed to my transition to college as my transition to "real life" many times this semester.  "Hey, you wanna go do something fun?  Oh, you can't?  You have homework?  Oh well, welcome to real life."  With the beginning of my "real life," I have been learning the truth in this little comic strip.  Calvin says that, "each egg represents of life's concerns."  If I assigned a few of my life's concerns to five eggs, I'd say one of them is homework, one is my family, another is my new friends, one is my responsibilities as a college student, the last is any free time left over for me.  Calvin is right when he says that the key is balancing the different concerns.  If one egg takes to long to get out of your hand, the others will all crash to the ground, and from the looks of Calvin's living room, cleaning up the mess is no easy task.  In our Freshman Experience course (a course required at TLU that teaches freshman how to read and perform like good college students) we had a class on time management, something I am no expert at.  They may as well have been teaching me how to juggle eggs.  The longer I go along, though, the more I'm learning how to balance my busy college schedule, and move each egg from hand to hand fast enough that I don't drop any.  Even if I do drop a couple along the way, which I'm sure is inevitable, I'll remember to be persistent.  There is no fifth box in the cartoon that shows what Calvin does next, but if there was, I'd bet that Calvin runs to the kitchen for another carton of eggs and maybe gets Hobbes to join him for a round.  Most likely they'd make an even bigger mess, but after all, "the important thing is persistence."

Works Cited

Watterson, Bill. It's a Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection. Kansas
City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996. Print.