My Plastic Ball

There's this massive plastic, thin-rope ball that's been sitting in the corner of my room for a while now. Stretched out, the entire thing covers about 10 meters. I use it for activities with my youth and have gotten into the habit of just haphazardly wrapping it around my hands when I'm done and tossing it back in my bag.

The result, of course, is this clump of garbage-bag thread so gnarly and caught with knots that it no longer correctly unwinds, and I've had to resort to toilet paper as a thread substitute.

A few days ago, I glanced over and decided that it was time. I would spend my Saturday afternoon unwinding, untangling — and totally conquering this rat's nest.

Full of determination and imagined stamina, I dived in.

The beginning started pretty easy. A few knots here, a loopty-loop there. I started off slow, not pulling so hard as to ensnarl the mass further. After a while, however, I lost my patience. The plastic thread kept catching, and when I stopped to admire my progress, I realized that I hadn't gotten very far at all.

I started yanking the thread in every direction, randomly grabbing pieces and jerking them away from the hellish center knot. Sometimes it made it better, sometimes worse. Sometimes I thought I was making headway and smiled at myself smugly — only to find yet another series of impediments, making my face fall.

You can imagine how frustrated I was. I stepped back, took a breath, watched the ducks eat banana leaves in the backyard and tried again. Whenever I reached the brink of exasperation, I averted my attention — I wrote to-do lists, re-ordered my stack of books, turned on my fan. But after a brief break, I went back to my project, full of fervor and with a sense of duty.

I pulled and tugged at random strings at lightning speeds. I delicately slipped one piece over another as if handling lace. I seriously contemplated just cutting off the rest of the stupid thing and calling it a day.

After a while, I looked down to check my progress again.

And wouldn't you know it? I was actually getting somewhere. It took me nearly an hour, but I eventually had my garbage-bag thread tightly wound into a nice, neat little ball.

When I was all done, I set it aside and admired it for awhile. Seriously, a ball of thread is NOT that big of a deal. But I was proud of it. And mostly I was proud that I didn't give up on it.

And then I thought, Hmm ... what I nice, neat little metaphor for my Peace Corps experience.