Get Going! A Lesson About Life and Lemons

Lemons and Lemonade

There are a great number of people out there who seem to just walk around feeling badly about everything around them, yet offering nothing to help solve the problem, most of us recognize these folks as complainers, and when faced with a complainer we do the obvious thing, we humor them, pat them on the back, give them a shoulder to cry on, and breathe a huge sigh of relief when they are done sucking our energy! We may even complain to others about how much we are bothered by the complaining, which is in of itself its own contradiction, but we should talk about that another time.

The bottom line is that bad stuff happens to people every day, the sun rises and bad stuff happens, the sun sets, and bad stuff happens. It's better if we just accept that it is going to happen, we can't stop it, but we can do something about it. Many people ask why suffering has to exist, and I have a somewhat simple answer, suffering exists to raise the collective awareness of our society. Human suffering is one of the greatest motivators out there, without it we would not have any quality of life! For example one of the very first innovations, the invention or discovery of the wheel as a tool was done because somebody was sick of dragging their food home, and sick of seeing everyone around them suffering in that way, so "Og" or "Grog" or whoever it was decided to find another way, and it changed everything for all of history. There are many reasons that you could choose to be sad; hunger, poverty, abuse, murder, the list goes on and on, but these things exist so that we as society can make steps to rise above them, and we cannot rise above them by stomping on them, we must rise above them by raising the collective awareness of society.

The point I am getting to is that most people choose not to do so, there's a saying that "when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade." This simple sentence implies something interesting, and that is when life gives you lemons, you use them and get rid of them! Yet most often when life hands us lemons we take them and we hang on to them, making sure that along the way we do not drop a single lemon, so instead of raising our awareness and rising above the troubles that we have in our lives, and doing something useful with those lemons we become "lemon collectors" we take every hard time and bad experience and hang on to it as though our lives depended on it, so we go through life, not drinking lemonade, but collecting lemons, and subconsciously that just brings more and more lemons into our lives, and one of the biggest reasons this happens is that not only do we become lemon collectors, we get together at parties and compare our lemons, and it seems that the person with the oldest most rotten the lemon wins! So you see people comparing their life lemons and getting some sense of sick pride when they are able to pull out of their pocket some 30 year old lemon that they have been carrying all their life, and seeing the crowds vanquished by their rotten lemon. My thought is that if you are running around, trying to "out-lemon" everyone, you are just going to run into more and more lemons.

Some people who are even on their way to winning get sucked into the game. Because if they haven't collected enough lemons they don't feel like they belong, so they go out and grab some lemons, and sometimes even borrow other people lemons just to fit in. This robs the world of a great many noble souls who could have done greater things if we as society did not suck them into being "lemon collectors". The answer is a simple one, let go of your lemons. Just let them go, if there are recent lemons well then by all means make yourself a nice tall glass of lemonade and drink it to celebrate letting all those old rotten lemons go. You may say I don't understand, you may even say, "how can I let these lemons go after what happened to me?" My question to you is this, is your life really better as a result of carrying around that pain/hatred/anger/sadness? What have those lemons ever done to serve you? Is it easier to carry around a pile of moldy lemons, or to just carry around a glass of lemonade?

Just a few thoughts as you go through life, next time you are at a gathering and somebody talks about how awful something is, maybe, instead of just nodding your head gravely and agreeing, maybe you could try and steer the conversation towards the possibility of what we as society can do to help in whatever way, if someone complains about the homeless, you could suggest getting together and doing a blanket collection, or a fundraiser for a local shelter, see what happens as the conversation goes from one of helplessness to one of hope and the ability to maybe make a small impact, I guarantee that you will have a much better time at the gathering if you try and help raise the consciousness of those around you, just by suggesting that the small group could make some difference.