The Water Balloon Curriculum

Growth has a curriculum, and the whole thing costs about four dollars at the local store.

First you underfill. The balloon comes off the faucet looking like a sad grape, and you learn that timid doesn’t splash. Nobody ever got soaked by caution.

Then you overcorrect. You hold it on the faucet one proud second too long and it bursts all over your shoes, and you learn that more is not a strategy. More is just more, delivered faster, to your socks. Ask me sometime about the year I tried to launch coffee inside a beer bar.

Then comes the right amount, and you know it by feel before you know it by logic. A well-filled balloon has a wobble to it, a kind of confidence. Heavy enough to matter, loose enough to survive the trip across the yard. The bar taught me this one. One location, filled properly, beats three filled to bursting, which is why I’ve never bought a second faucet.

Then multiple at once. This is the stage where you find out the amounts don’t transfer. Right now I’m filling a bar, a marketing job, a blog, a novel, and a daughter’s construction projects, and every one of them takes a different pressure. Calibration isn’t a skill you earn once. It’s a skill you earn per balloon.

And then the last stage, the one nobody grades you on: you learn to have fun with it. Which turns out to be the entire point, because nobody in the history of summer has ever filled a water balloon to keep it. A balloon filled right is meant to leave your hand.

Stay Positive & Here, Catch