Someone told me today:

“Your life is your laboratory.”

I never paid too much attention in science class.  In fact, I’m quite certain the only way I passed my high school courses was that the teacher offered extra credit if you handed in a weekly synopsis of PBS’s Nova.  I’ve always had a thing for public broadcasting, so this was always more treat than test to me.

So, even though I didn’t always find myself in the lab, I still liked how I felt in there.  The smooth, clean beakers.  The noisy bunsen burners.  How the tiny explosions, contained combustions, and even the exposed guts of the fetal pigs found a way to sparkle.

The lab evoked a gritty  curiosity.  Sure I wanted to know how something ticked, but was I willing to actually cut the thing open to find out?  Sometimes I answered with a voracious “yes” – and sometimes I doodled song lyrics in the margins of my lab notes.

What I liked today, when someone referred to my life as my lab was realizing for the first time that the equations, the experiments, and the doodles are all equally relevant.  And how absolutely wonderful it is to build an entire existence out of trial and error.