R and J in the USA

We drove about an hour and a quarter west of Minneapolis to the tiny town of Darwin, Minnesota, to see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine made by one person.

There are other world’s largest balls of twine in other places, but they were group efforts. This is the largest one made by a single person. How large? 12 feet in diameter. 40 feet in circumference. 17,400 pounds. That big.

At one point, Ryan turned around and caught Julie in a deep state of revelry staring at the massive ball encased in glass. We were in a town that one would barely notice was a town if it weren’t for the sign declaring it so and this glass shelter of tons of purposefully wrapped twine, all wrapped by one man over the course of decades of his life being the only definitive presence in this town other than a teeny park across the street and a few neighborhood streets off what was barely discernible as a Main Street. But the street signs had little cartoon images of a ball of twine, and the one building that seemed commercial that wasn’t yet anything, indicated that someday it would be a commercial location of some sort and twine would be referenced in it’s name. So, whatever this big ball of twine was and represented to these people, they were embracing it wholeheartedly. And, maybe it was enough that the ball put Darwin on the map and made it a destination for people all over the world to make this detour outside of Minnesota’s big cities. The guest book was filled with names from all over the country and even all over the world of people that had come to stare in awe at, well, a big ball of twine. It didn’t do anything but sit there, but the guest comments in the book were all somewhere between enthusiastic and superlative.

And Julie, sitting there, rapt by the sight of it completely got why it captured folks, or at least, she was deep in revelry about why it captured her, and captured her it did.

She sat there wondering, “Why is this so fantastic?” Because it undoubtedly was.

And then she realized it. She was looking at a physical embodiment of determination and dedication in its purest form, for no other purpose than determination itself.

Determination and dedication are qualities that are usually ingredients added to a soup to create an outcome that produces its own rewards. They are the inputs to something remarkable. They are what is credited for an achievement that brings its own riches. Perhaps someone applies determination and dedication to build a business or train as an athlete and pursue some form of athletic greatness or discover something in science or engineer a bridge or a tunnel or some other civic marvel. The list goes on and on. Human perseverance is a remarkable quality.

We had visited the presidential museum of Calvin Coolidge in Vermont and absolutely loved, and completely agreed with his comment that all good things in life are the result of perseverance. Julie is a deep believer of this creed and a pursuer of it in practice – setting her mind on a goal and then doing her best to persevere along the road to realizing whatever that goal or dream is. Oftentimes, the obstacles to dreams, visions and goals are sexy ones. Obstacles that are worthy of story-telling. Obstacles that make good drama and invest a witness in wanting to see if the protagonist can overcome them. But, more often, the obstacles are the monotony of simply remaining consistent in pursuit when nothing particularly flashy or sexy is going on, when it’s just a matter of showing up every day and wrapping the same piece of twine around the same ball knowing, with total confidence, that the same unremarkable action done with remarkable consistency and perseverance, just on it’s own, with no other skills or events or obstacles other than time and distractibility to overcome, can lead to something tremendous, weighty, and great.

The fact that this man had created something that was a physical embodiment of these traits alone, and served no other purpose at all, and didn’t need to, just perseverance in physical form, absolutely floored Julie, and that is what she was ruminating on when Ryan caught her slack-jawed, agog, and in some kind of massive-ball-of-twine trance. 

She stared at the ball and felt the rhythm of it. Every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, this man had decided what he would give his life to doing, and he went out and did it. It was like a physical embodiment of how big a human life is and can be, if the energies contained within it are not spread out in all sorts of random directions, when those energies captured and transferred towards one end. Whatever end that might be for that person, this is how big the energy inside a human being can get. 

And, of course, the bigness of what human potential is and can build to is everywhere in the world. It is embodied in every corner of civilization, from the tallest building to children raised, to great works of art, to mail delivered, to cookies baked, to fields plowed, to mountains climbed, to songs written, to stories told, the cumulative energy of millions upon millions of human lives is laid bare all over the world and all throughout history. And Julie often thinks about what happens when people harness that energy inside of them, and do so with perseverance, and direct it towards whatever ends most light them up.

And here was a chance to see, in the most physical and tangible way, what purpose plus persistence plus perseverance looks like. Well, that, and a whole lotta twine.