The tiles felt uneasy this morning as it had been discovered by the mistress that one of them had decided to sit congruent to the rest of them. One of the other tiles had awoken during the night to the sound of vinyl scratching and the sucking noise of glue becoming unfastened. A popping sound erupted and soon there lay one solitary tile, out of place, congruent, erratically strewn amidst the other, systematically laid, tiles.
The tile who had awoken to the building noise was troubled by the scene. None of the tiles had ever before been possessed to move out of sync with the others. They had been designed by a draftsman, pressed in an automated factory, stacked in meticulous grid fashion, boxed in symmetrical containers, laid by careful hands, and had remained content on the kitchen floor in a perfectly composed checkerboard pattern for nigh of twenty years, and then suddenly, one of them had moved!
As the morning sun entered the window the dust in the air once again rose and fell in a lilting fashion as it always had. The dew rose from the grass, the house creaked and shifted, and the people in the house began to rummage about as people tend to do. However, the tiles felt completely in disarray. One of their brothers had fallen out of line, thus catastrophically altering the perfect symmetry of the pattern that kitchen tiles generally prefer to lay in.
The tiles were tentative to act. They were self-conscious of the fact that sooner or later the mistress would find them in general disarray unless they were to act quickly, but acting quickly, much less acting at all, is not something that kitchen tiles like to do. So the other tiles simply sat there, each of them feeling distress at the disarray and chaos of the one who chose to change. They felt numb to act but were in terror at the fact that one of them had.
The tile that had moved was in a world of discovery. His bottom side was exposed to an air flow previously unfamiliar to him. It gave him a sense of weightlessness that exillerated and inspired him. He gazed up at a ceiling that looked exactly the same as it always had except that now he was viewing it from a 37 degree angle. Suddenly his entire world had changed. Without anything different occurring in his environment his world had changed, and it was all due to his one moment of motivation called motion. The tile soon realized that the world was a subjective place and that his perception of it was it his command.
The other tiles did not share the renegade tile’s point of view. In fact, they were quickly moving from uneasiness to outrage! How dare that tile move autonomously, without any regard for how they might feel. The other tiles knew it was only a matter of time before the mistress discovered the whole fiasco. But what could the other tiles do, especially when ‘doing’ was the root of the very problem itself. By doing anything at all the other tiles would only make things worse! And so they all sat, trembling, unsettled, and weary of what things may come.
The mistress did indeed discover the loose tile, and to the bemusement of the other tiles, seemed to think the situation was quite trivial. She simply retrieved the glue from the drawer, smeared a generous goop upon the underside of the offset tile and proceeded to replace it upon the floor.
As the days stretched on the other tiles found themselves wondering thoughts they had never before thought. An event had occurred; an event of deliverance, liberation, and freedom. One of their own had made a choice and turned it into an individual action with consequences and new experiences. Fate was now just a word to the tiles. The next night there was noise of vinyl scratching and glue squelching. In the morning there lay two tiles upon the floor.
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