Spinning plates
Fortune favors the bold, so the saying goes. As news travels of my upcoming adventure, friends, family, and strangers have told me that I am, indeed, bold. I am definitely hoping that the dame favors me. I’m letting spinning plates crash everywhere around me.
Last week my mind overflowed with everything to be done. I had a mental image of giant spinning plates, impossibly suspended in the air, and demanding that I keep them from crashing down to the floor. I realized that I had no idea where the expression “spinning plates” came from, but that in my mind, the plates were spun up in the air and could last a certain amount of time before I had to tend to them, lest they break.
I contemplated my spinning plates and realized that the whole problem is that there are just too many plates. They will not all survive, so spin the ones I care about.
The proper white dinner plates, the ones I’m supposed to want, will crash, shattering into dust. I have to choose, and I just do not care enough about Zooms, PowerPoints, and Jira to save them. But they must spin just a little bit longer.
Square logistic plates spin in complicated patterns and must be touched in order, but they, too, will not need my attention forever. Just keep spinning those for now, and all will work out.
A delicate red plate, my heart, my Ollie, I spin with love, prepared to dive to save it like I do when he’s in harm’s way. He’s not durable, that plate. Handle with great care, even if I don’t always know what to do.
Bright mismatched ceramic plates, my dear ones, it’s a joy to keep these spinning, even as there are so many other plates. In the end, these are what matters, and I hope that their strength holds, should I wobble.
Floating above all these plates, the bone china of my dreams, light, precious, easily broken and hard to repair. I spun them as high as I could to try and keep them afloat until I could tend to them. They’d begun to float down, still spinning, but growing more insistent. It is time, they say. Tend to us or we fall.
These delicate, intricate plates require the boldest action to save them. I stand on my tiptoe, leg stretched out behind me, one hand below, and the other, reaching with all of the strength and grace I can muster. Please don’t crash.
