Unadorned Enchantments

Following a thunderous rain my granddaughter, Lori, and I left the house to play in the neighborhood creek. We put two matchbook boats side by side in the stream. We ran as quickly as we could to the footbridge crossing the creek and watched the progress of the two little boats. 

Although these boats were identical in size and structure, one boat quickly sailed under our footbridge while the other boat bumped along slowly was caught in a hydraulic force and spit into an eddy where it stalled.

“Pop, how come that boat kept going and the other one got stuck?” Lori asked.

Wanting Lori to be the smartest kid in gym class I said, “According to scientists studying chaos theory, it’s due to deterministic non-periodic flow.”

“That’s what I thought,” replied Lori. “I think I’ll go ask Mimi.”

I never discovered Mimi’s answer, but Lori’s dilemma presents some difficult questions: 

• Do we just spin through life like matchbox boats? 
• Does the outcome of our life depend on the currents of fate or the structure of our life or something else? 
• Are our actions determined? 
• Do we have free will to sail the streams of our choosing? 
• Why are our lives so unpredictable? 
• Why does the kid voted most likely to succeed spend his life under a park bench while the class clown wins the Noble Prize?

I strolled home considering these questions. As soon as I stepped over the threshold of our home, the aroma of freshly baked cookies wafted from the kitchen where I found Mimi and Lori taking the first batch from the oven. “Have a cookie.” Lori said.  

Sometimes when we try to explain the unexplainable—nature and nurture, genetics and environment, normal and abnormal, we can thank God for oatmeal cookies.

And, fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a warm hug, an act of kindness, a word of encouragement, or the gentle touch of a loving hand, not to mention, sailboats, basketballs, violins, butterflies, and reading The Chronicles of Narnia to grandchildren before bedtime prayers. 

These and other simple pleasures, the nuances, the incongruities, the subtleties, are what give life value. They are the unadorned enchantments that frame our lives. 

That’s the best I can do to explain the wonder of human behavior. And so it is that a simple question from a child gives me the hopeful assurance of life’s richness for us all.

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