My momma always told me life was like a box of chocolates. But she never explained to me how a simile worked - which made that saying confusing due to my developmental disability.
Taking the statement 'life is like a box of chocolates' at face value though, that doesn't make very much sense either. I'm familiar with the biological concept of life. And I'm familiar with boxes of chocolate. But as far as I've noticed, there are no metabolic processes going on inside any boxes of chocolate.
Perhaps she was talking about one's subjective experience of life. By which she would have meant what? Consciousness? Maybe she was intimating that both animate and inanimate objects are illusory abstractions of some sort of global consciousness. That'd be profound, I suppose. Not terribly useful, but profound...
But no, that is not what she meant. And I know that is not what she mean because she would expressly state that was not what she meant. Waylaying any hint of broaching the profound, she would always explain that 'life was like a box of chocolates' because 'you never know what you're going to get'.
Now, I don't know if you've ever had a box of chocolates. And I don't want to spoil it for you if you have not. But what is inside of a box of chocolates is not that terribly surprising. If you get a box of chocolates, typically, inside will be an assortment of delicious chocolates. There's really not much variation from that formula: box of chocolates = a box with chocolates inside.
Certainly, with life, you really never do know what you are going to get. Life is full of surprises. But no one, to my knowledge, has ever opened a box of chocolates and instead of finding a number of cocoa and sugar based candies, they died of blood cancer.
So, I'm not certain as to what mother meant with that 'life is like a box of chocolates' business. But it sure was nice of her to subject herself to getting raped by that principal to get me into private school.
<3
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