The insides of things

I was watching Little House on the Prairie recently and there were two young trouble-making boys  that suggested they go and shoot some birds for fun.  An adult asked, “Why would you want to do that?” and one boy replied, “So we can open it up and see its guts.”

Serial killer trait assessments aside, this made me start thinking about other ways people have acted on this urge – to take something apart and see how it works, to discover something you haven’t known about, to understand.

Sometimes, it’s as if we get taken apart – we get put into a different room, a different situation, with different people, and suddenly it seems as if we’re trying to figure out how everything works and what we can do with it.

Maybe, if we take things apart, our ideas, the way we communicate, the way we interact, the expected habits and actions, and look at them and understand them, maybe we can put them together in different ways and discover a different life, or at least an interesting situation.