Origami

The other day, my daughter watched a video of someone doing origami on YouTube and decided to attempt it herself. After getting stuck and frustrated, she asked me for help.  I didn't have the heart to tell her that precise folding and creating sharp lines has never been my strong suit, so I attempted to finish her project.  It was a big fat fail.  In fact, she had moved on to something else before I even accomplished all the steps in the video.

Even though I doubt my daughter will be make the effort to create another crane or lily anytime soon, I find myself thinking about origami a lot lately.

The question that keeps popping up in my mind is:  Do you think a person starts out as a flat piece of paper?  Or do you think that we each start out as a fancy folded piece of art... and growing up is what unfurls us back into a simpler/truer form?  When I think about my life, I guess I'm not really sure if I'm being "folded" or "unfolded."

Maybe both.

I can remember making these definitive black and white statements about myself /my beliefs back in high school.  (You know, with the unwavering assurance that you *completely* understand the world that could only belong to a 16-year-old.)  Things I said I'd do, or things I was positive that I would never do.  Lines that I drew around myself in the sand that were going to be these hard and fast rules for my life.  Maybe those were my first "hard folds."

If so, quite a few of those have already come undone.

And maybe I had to be "unfolded" to make sure there was enough paper for the new folds.  The complicated shapes that I never planned to attempt.  The sculpted corners of my life that only happened because I was nudged in that direction by my own misguided life choices... or by the people that love me the most.

And, my God... some of this folding hurts.

Sometimes I want to push back against the bending paper of life with all my weight and force it to stay where it always was.  Sometimes it feels like bending that corner into it's new location is going to crush me.  And even when I know in my heart the paper HAS to be creased, sometimes it feels like the entire thing might rip in half in the process. 

I don't know if the end goal is a life that resembles a beautifully folded sculpture, or the peace that must come with being a flat sheet of paper that's finally smooth and free of all of life's creases. 

What is am sure of is that I should probably get comfortable with being "unfolded" and "refolded" for the rest of my life.