Instruction Manuals

Today, my son and I built an amusement park ride.
 
Okay, it was a K'nex model of an amusement park ride. Who do you think we are, Phineas and Ferb?
 
I am pretty excited about our creation. It spins around and around, and really does look like one of the rides at Coney Island, and best of all, we built it together (though my son is quick to say he did most of the work).
 
I am not an engineer. I am fairly artsy-crafty, but when it comes to the structural stuff, I've been known to ask for help. Our amusement park ride, however, came with a large instruction manual, complete with full-size pictures, so, between us and the manual, we were set. Would that everything we had to do in life came with detailed instructions and full-size pictures!
 
Alas, life does not come with an instruction manual. There's no document that tells us what's the most important thing on any given day or how far out on a limb we can go for work or family without falling off the tree. We have to figure these things out on our own. There's no set of instructions for raising our kids (okay, maybe there are a lot of those, but are they there with us for all the ridiculously small stuff that no one would bother writing about? No.) And if there is an instruction manual for an indefinitely smooth-sailing professional life, I sure haven't found it yet.
 
Perhaps one of the reasons building our carousel was so satisfying was that we followed the instructions, and we got just what we were supposed to--a thing exactly like the one in the picture on the box. I'm sure I'd be bored if life were that simple for more than a few days, but, wow, for one day (well, part of one day), life complete with an instruction manual--that felt mighty good.