When Life Gives You Lemons

There’s an old proverb that reads: “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

I know what the proverb means, but what it doesn’t tell you is what to do if you don’t happen to like lemonade. 

I know, I know, it seems like I’m being too literal.  Truth is, I’m not.  It’s truly a puzzle to me (okay, so I think about weird things all the time…) what, metaphorically speaking, you’re supposed to do if you don’t happen to like lemonade.  There’s still a bitter taste to it, no matter how much sugar you use to disguise the taste.  In a literal sense, if bad stuff happens and you try to disguise it by pouring a lot of artificial sweetness over it, that bitterness underneath is just going to sneak up on you twice as effectively, because you’ve tried to fool yourself into thinking it isn’t there.

Personally, me, if life hands me lemons, I use them to clean the disposal, toilet, or whatever filthy place I can get that needs disinfecting.  Those “lemons” are lessons.  They’re supposed to teach you how to deal with adversity, and to help you become stronger and more capable of loving, by first learning to deal with the problems face-on, rather than covering them up with a bunch of even more damaging sweetness you really don’t feel.  But there are lots of parts of our lives and selves that can use a little spring cleaning.  Old hurts, festering wounds, and deep feelings of anger, resentment, jealousy and more that we don’t acknowledge on a daily basis, but are still hidden under there – those are the dirt trapped in our disposal, toilet, laundry, etc (choose your own metaphor.. whatever needs a good cleaning).  By facing the major problems when they come along, we learn the skills and lessons we need to deal with those little problems we’ve almost forgotten about, but which are cluttering up the “house” of our minds and souls.

So the next time life hands you lemons, don’t make lemonade… Cut those bad boys in half, roll up your sleeves, and scrub away… You’ll feel better in the end than sitting around with a big glass of problems will ever make you feel!

~ by esthermitchell on November 14, 2008.