Lost My Marbles

By Charlie Melton

I talked to my daughter the other day. She works in Indiana, is raising 3 kids, and studying for something important and time sensitive. She doesn’t know if she can get off of work to come down for Thanksgiving. I gave her my usual “I’m getting older and may not live until another holiday” speech, but she’s developed immunity to the “guilt trip”. I brought out my new and improved “Marbles” theory. Stick with me and I’ll try to explain.

You’ve heard someone has “lost his marbles”. Back in the old days before social media and political correctness it was a term to describe someone was mentally unbalanced. It equates marbles to degrees of sanity. Fewer marbles equate to decreased sanity.

I have a different take on “marbles”. Here’s the marbles theory. I figure we’re each born with the same number of marbles. For illustration, let’s say 12. OK, we all know someone that maybe has only 8 or 9 marbles. I worked for a guy I swear had no functional marbles at all. For this, let’s agree most people have a dozen marbles.

Facets of your life are like slots on a board. One slot may be family. Another is career. Yet another slot may be music, or art, or dancing. There may be lots and lots of slots on your life board.

So I take my marbles and put them where I want them. I can spread them all out and be pretty average at everything. I can be a good family man, be acceptable at work, play a little guitar, and watch dance shows. I can show due diligence to all of these areas and be a pretty average Joe.

Let’s say I want to be really good at music. I can put a few extra marbles in the music slot and may be successful at music. Since I only have 12 marbles total, I’ll have to take them from other places. I may choose to pull marbles from the career slot, or family, or both. The more marbles I put into music, the less I have for other things and life gets out of balance. I think the disastrous lives of many pop music and movie stars prove the theory. The “King of Pop” was a music legend, but his life was so wacky it was like a really bad cartoon.

There’s also the stereotypical absent minded professor. We picture him as disheveled and unable to even remember to tie his shoes. All of his marbles goes into his research, at which he’s brilliant. He’s not even aware of the existence of other aspects of life.

I can use this for my own life. On my board of life I have no marble in a slot relating to sports skills or anything else that requires hand-eye coordination or the ability to say, “Go Team. Rah.” I had those marbles left over, so I put them into nerdy pursuits. Because I used those marbles as I chose, I know more useless information than the other nerds. I also dropped an extra marble in the locale for an affinity for tasty treats, but that’s another story.

So what’s the moral of the story? If you put too much into one area of your life, other areas will suffer. The puritan work ethic notwithstanding, too much work makes for a bad home life. Too much music makes for a bad work life. Too many tasty treats make for a bad doctors visit and an inability to see your shoes. Out of balance is bad, even if someone pays you a lot of money or respect for being out of balance.

So how does this relate to my daughter? She forgot to put a marble in the “visit my aging parent” slot. I’m just reminding her to be balanced and not end up unbalanced like a moon walking rock star with a one glove and a pet chimp. For her well being she needs to balance out and come to Thanksgiving. Besides that, she makes really good pie, which helps me balance out as well.