life is a maze

I was hanging out with my five year old brother tonight when he asked me if I wanted to do a maze in his coloring book. At first I said no, but when he insisted (“There’s enough Katherine! We should share the mazes), I agreed. He handed me the book and a blue crayon to do the maze with and sat down next to me to watch. At first I didn’t use the crayon at all: I studied the maze—starting at the end because I heard somewhere that makes it easier—until I was sure that I knew the correct path before I started actually drawing on the page. My little brother was so confused why I didn’t start right away, and then impressed when I completed the maze correctly “on the very first try!” He had no idea that I had actually plotted out my path beforehand, so when it actually showed I would be perfect. All of his mazes were abstract compositions of crayon lines, trailing back and forth countless times until he found the end.

Now I wonder why I so naturally decided to take the approach I did; why my first instinct is to sit still and think and plan until I’m sure that I can act in a way that hides all the mistakes, all the messy work my brain did to get to the end of the maze. I’m so programmed to try and do everything the “right” way, and I think a lot of Uni students feel the same way. It’s hard to admit that we mess up sometimes, especially when the people around us seems so smart and so on top of things. And back to my maze analogy, it’s not like if I had taken a wrong path and had to backtrack my little brother would have been surprised or judged me in anyway—I think that would have actually been more natural to him. I was more worried about making a mistake in front of myself.

I’ll give another maze anecdote: my family was in Breckenridge one summer when I was probably around 13. At the top of one of the peaks there’s an “adventure park” with an alpine slide and zipline and all sorts of cool stuff. One of the things there was a life-size maze (specifically targeted to younger kids but still it looked fun). You had to find all four checkpoints in the maze and then find your way out. My older brother and I went in and ended up splitting up. He completed the maze in a speedy 5 minutes or so, while I was stuck wandering around for at least 10 minutes after that. He was up in a lookout tower making fun of me for being slow the whole time (which I’m not mad about because I’m sure I would have done the same) and it sucked until I finally found the exit. But that maze shows that sometimes things, no matter how easy they’re supposed to be, can take time and work and be frustrating and embarrassing but eventually you’ll find your way out of the maze and everything will be alright.

To summarize my tangential post: make mistakes! Get lost (figuratively)! Don’t be afraid to not be perfect! Take it from my little bro and his crazy mazes.