There’s an old saying that has been milling around my mind for the past few months; along with all the other craziness that wants to be heard.
“How do you make a statue of an elephant? Get the biggest granite block you can find and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”
There is an unlikely story about the origin of this statement by the artist Michelangelo. He was asked about the difficulties that he must have encountered in sculpting his masterpiece David. He replied with a rather direct and comical description of his creative process:
“It's easy; I just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”
This seems like such an easy task, however, in this writers opinion, it doesn’t always work that way.
Like most young boys, growing up, I was involved in the scouting program. One of the hardest obtained and cherished awards in this program is the merit badge. There are merit badges for every sort of project and talent that you can imagine. From American Business to Woodworking with 133 more in between.
For anyone not familiar with the scouting program, in order to fulfill the requirements of the Eagle Scout, which is the highest rank attainable in the program, one must earn 13 required merit badges and 8 elective badges for a total of 21, if my math merit badge is still in order.
The required badges are, just to name a few, citizenship, camping, emergency preparedness, cooking, and other essentials that are hoped will assist the scout in his life. The other 8 are what intrigues the mind of the particular scout. These badges are worn on a sash across their chest with as much pride and honor as the medals worn on a military uniform. We fought, scraped and worked long hours for those little round appliqué patches. And they meant everything to us.
I was like most scouts in the program, always looking for my next merit badge; one that I could proudly display on my sash of honor. Of course, I wasn’t always the brightest bulb in the pack, (or troop as the case may be) as many of my choices in life have proven.
I decided that a carving merit badge would be something that other scouts probably would overlook, which means I had a badge that most wouldn’t. Score! It also meant I got to play with knives and other sharp things. Double Score!
I got the requirements from the badge counselor, who is the person who gets to say whether or not you passed all of the requirements necessary to receive that badge and started my day-long journey into-and-out-of the world of carving.
So, back to my original thought — “Get the biggest granite block you can find and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” Got it. I decided that trying to acquire a large piece of very expensive stone was probably not going to happen so I chose the next best thing — soap.
Soap, I could get, and in those days they were all in the form of bars, not these handy dandy pump action foamy goodness with scents and moisturizers. Just good old fashioned hard bars of soap.
As I set to my task of carving, I puzzled for a while deciding what was hidden inside this bar that needed to be released by my chipping away at the parts not needed.
This was going to be easy.
Rolling the bar over and over in my eager little hands, I contemplated what great and wonderful animal would come to life before my eyes? Let’s see. A Bear? — No. A Deer? — No. How about a Fish? After all, it was a bar or soap, it goes in water right?
After what seemed like an eternity — actually, less than a minute but hey, this critter needed out. I decided on an owl, my mom’s favorite animal. I figured I could give her the glorious masterpiece when I finished.
I took my project into the backyard where I wouldn't have to worry about my feverishly sculpting hands and flying shavings of soap and started to the task at hand; releasing this poor soap owl from its blocky tomb.
I carefully whittled away at the outer casing as my excitement grew watching this creation unfold before my eyes. I carved and whittled as the bar continually grew smaller and smaller. — Wow, this owl was really buried in there. I was bound and determined to release him come hell or high, soapy water.
My fervor grew more intense as that bar started to lose shape, looking less and less like a bar and closer to what I envisioned as a beautiful owl. I carved away more and more of what I believed was not part of the beautiful bird in a desperate attempt to free it.
After a painstakingly long and grueling amount of time passing — about 10 minutes – I realized I had carved right through that owl and left him as part of the many hundreds of soap shavings on that table. All that was left was a sliver of soap and a pile of shavings, along with a washed-up ego. I killed that poor owl before it had a chance to spread its wings; lost forever, never to exist because I didn’t have the skill to chip away only the parts that didn’t look like an owl.
I gathered up my poor shaven soap and decided at that moment that I wasn’t meant to be a soap carver. All of those poor critters trapped inside bars of soap were not going to die at my hands; no sir, not like that. There wasn't any glory, any beautiful creature for my mom to proudly display. There was only a sad burial in the kitchen sink as I washed away all remnants of my epic fail.
As I look back now on that day, and the whole soap-owl debacle; I realize that there's more to that saying than what I originally believed. I was only looking at it in its logical sense; from a very narrow perspective. It isn’t just telling us that chipping away until you find what’s inside each piece of stone, bronze, wood or, in my case soap is a marvelous thing waiting to emerge at the hands of someone who can see them trapped inside, (Not I cried the blind man) but applying that logic to our own lives and the things we need to carve away.
I have realized that sometimes, life is exactly like that elephant or owl trying to escape. Instead of chipping away at that block looking for the hidden objects, maybe we need to chip away at our own lives the same way looking for the hidden glory we all have inside.
“How do you have a better life? Start carving away anything that doesn’t look like what you envisioned your life to be.”
We are all a work in progress. Go slow, take it easy and make sure that what you carve away are the parts that don’t look like your future. If you try to go too fast, push too hard, you may end up like my bar of soap; just shavings of what you intended to be.
SP
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