Life is like a cartoon car chase in one of Floyd Gottfredson’s 1930’s Mickey Mouse comic strips. No, really, it is! You never know what is going to happen in the next frame. Will the alien space craft scoop up Junior as he flies out of the rumble seat? Fifty-fifty chance, don’t you think? Will Crocko Diddly-Dial catch up and eat everybody in the car? Probably not if it was a G-rated comic strip… and it was.
The only control we have over life are the reactions we can manage as we go and bad things continue to happen to us. We are trapped by the cliff and the river, so we jump the car successfully across. If we are successful, we bounce onto the road on the other side, and Crocko falls into the river. Of course it is the road to nowhere and the chase only ends when the cartoon of life reaches the last panel.
Okay, so that all sounds very scary, and we must hope that Mickey is merely crazy, and not on to something real in this metaphorical thesis of mayhem. Yet, there is a way to effectively deal with the car chase. We need to treat it all as a cartoon, a comic book story, and simply laugh.
Catch a Falling Star 