How to really make lemonade:

How to really make lemonade:

A bit of wisdom about life.

Life’s a pretty strange goddamned place. It’s a series of events, some fortunate, others, arguably, not so much. It’s a constant period of learning, trails, and tribulations to which everyone seems to have their own bit of wisdom. Everyone knows the saying “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” – And I think this is a great quote. It’s teaching you to take something which, in a variety of contexts, could be viewed as negative and turns it into something a lot more positive. There are, however, things which I think we are not taught in our average, every day, lives, and that’s what I’m going to write about today…tonight…whatever.

Sure, when life hands you lemons, it’s important to understand how to shift your perspective and turn it into a positive. What about those moments when life reads like a terrifying movie from your childhood? What about those moments when you’ve set yourself up to carry on in the calmness of your existence, to buckle down and work hard and something comes along and just says “You think that’s what you’re doing? No you’re not. This is life; you don’t get to make those decisions right now. This is what happens and you have no choice what-so-ever but to deal with it, and deal with it Right. Now.”

So many people are honestly trained to ignore those moments, to ignore those basic, simple, responses that are powerful enough to physically manifest themselves over the entire scope of your body. Everyone uses them in allegory, and you’ve all heard them. Think about it. “His blood ran cold.” “Her heart skipped a beat.” “Her blood boiled with rage.” and so on. They are examples of such metaphor and they are used all throughout literature.

Every media spectrum we have has shown us these things. In literature, we see it in some of the examples above. Even in film, even in commercials, we’re bombarded with these concepts. It honestly seems, to this writer, however, that this had led to an unfair desensitization to these feelings. We’re taught to ignore these very basic and primal responses, unless, of course, we have to rationalize them as generically bad, or a way for us to plug a product, and I’d like to take a moment to offer a different perspective.

I would like to put forth the idea that these responses are not always bad. They come in all shapes, all sizes, all lengths of time; from the longest five minutes of your life, to the entire rest of your life. They can mean all kinds of things, but if there’s one thing I have found to be true about them, it’s this: It does not pay to ignore these things ever, any more than it does to fight them, and, above all else, it never pays to go looking for them either.

These are the moments that life has selected, where you see something, feel something, meet someone, and everything else in your life is given no choice but to stop, because that’s all it can do. All it can do is stop because the sheer scope of what you’re looking at is impossible to conceive if you don’t. However, that being said, it is entirely up to you to acknowledge it and choose to take it in. If you don’t? That’s it. It’s gone. It’ll be back, but never in the same shape.

How do you take something like that in? Honestly, it’s a bit like standing in the surf in letting the wave roll into you. You’ve got to accept that it might knock you over. You’ve got to accept that it might hurt you. You’ve got to accept that you might get some water in your lungs, you’ve got to accept that you might sputter, that you might cough, choke, gag and even vomit, and then you’ve got to accept that fact that it might kill you…and then you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do with that.

I ‘m sure there was a moment where you felt something, maybe it was something just too damn big to stare down, and maybe you had the knee-jerk reaction to get the fuck out of there. If it was the latter, then you really sit down and make sure that’s what’s going on. Look at what frightens you, stare it right in the damn face, and see how scared of it you really are, and then decide. If it wasn’t, if you just saw something you couldn’t comprehend and decided to turn your back on it? Well, then I have no choice but to offer some kind of condolences to you and hope that maybe, just maybe, I can help that not happen to you again in the future.

Sure, when the wave hits, you can kick your feet and scream and run away. What’s that going to teach you? That wave, for whatever reason, was just too big. That’s okay, as long as you’re okay with it, but don’t just leave it at that. Sit down and think about the wave, and what was it that scared you? Why did you run away from it? What was so bad? Was it really as big as you remember? Sit down and really ask yourselves things.

Now, stay with me here, and think for a moment that this metaphor is using the simple example of survival – and then remember what I said about metaphors desensitizing you to these things. Hold onto that thought while you continue reading.

So. You want to live and a big, fuck off, scary wave comes rolling your way. Of course you ran away. Why? You wanted to live. That’s easy enough to accept. Right? Right. The problem is that, even with that metaphor, that justification is just too simple. It’s not that black and white. You didn’t run away from it because it was too big, or might have killed you, because it’s not really a wave. You were dealing with one of life’s biggest bastard of a lemon. You were dealing with fear.

Oh, I know, how can I say such a thing?

‘Fear is so important! Fear is what helps us survive by knowing we’re somewhere we shouldn’t be! Fear is an instinct to run away!”

I’m honestly not going to argue against that logic, because it makes sense. Yes, fear is a survival instinct. It exists in every animal, across every species, regardless of gender, diet, or size. Every animal, which includes humans, has a hardwired understanding of that feeling and what it represents, but there’s one, fundamental, difference between the animal world, and the world of humans: Humans are the only ones clever enough to invent reasons for fear.

We, as a species, manifest in so many forms, using it in all manner of shapes, sizes and colors. It’s something which we can rationalize into any excuse we want, to fit any situation we want, and it’s the only thing we ever really need to talk ourselves out of doing something, out of living life. Yes, life will throw big, bastard, waves at you. It will, no doubt about it, it happens to everyone. Again, they can come in just about every shape and every size as those fear excuses – convenient huh?

These are the moments when it is easiest to use that inventive power, where it becomes simpler to rationalize yourself out of something, rather than to look at it and figure out what to do with it. For example:

You’re going out with your friends, maybe you’re going to see a movie and then you’re all going to skip out for a few rounds of drinks, stumble home laughing, and pass out on your couch because you’ve worn yourself out having fun. The movie wasn’t the greatest, probably some comedy about some strange series of events that used one too many fart jokes for you, but you had a good time with your friends, you made a couple jokes, everybody laughed, you’re feeling pretty good about yourself.

You’ve all been there, I imagine. Now stay with me; this is where it gets interesting.

You’re at the bar, having drinks, laughing or whatever, and you go to get your next bottle because you’re out. Someone steps up to the bar beside you and orders a drink. Maybe it’s the same drink, maybe it’s not. You look over, you make eye contact. It’s brief. There might have even been a smile there – and this is when the world stops.

It might only be for a moment, but you’re standing there running through the list of things you want to say to this person, cross checking them with the one-thousand and one things that could go wrong, and that, as I see it, is where the problem lies.

This is the time when it’s easiest to invent the fear, to find the lemon, to give yourself all the reassurances that you need to shut the fuck up, say nothing, look away, go back to your seat and ponder about who this person might have been for the next two weeks.

Why’d you do that? Why take a bite of that lemon? Were you scared you’d be shot down? Were you scared they would find you boring? Were you worried you’d just say something really stupid and embarrassing? It could have been any of those things, but you know what it really is at the end of the day? It’s that you have no idea if it was any of those things because you didn’t give any of those things a chance to happen.

You took an opportunity and you talked yourself out of it. There could have been something there or there could have been nothing. The fact of the matter really is that you will never know, because life handed you a lemon and you took a big bite out of it. You let your head convince you that your gut was telling you to fuck off with this idea, that it would all end horribly wrong, and that you shouldn’t just bother.

That’s the difference between looking at life and listening to that that gut wrenching understanding that it often gets passed off as – and don’t let me underestimate that. Listening to your gut is important. On the other hand, if you’re never going to give yourself the chance, you’re effectively talking for it anyway, that’s one great way to take that lemon of life and smash it into the bullet you just sent into your foot.

This is the part where some of you might be going: “But wait a minute! I thought you said you were going to talk about how these things could be positive?!”

Hold on. I’m getting to it now, thanks for sticking with me.

Life does not always give you lemons, it does not always rain on you, and it does not always kick you when you are down. Life does not always give you what you want just because you want it. Sometimes, life will give you fresh, sweet, fruits. Sometimes, life will give you sunshine. Sometimes, life will give you exactly what you need to get back up on your feet, and sometimes, just sometimes; it will give you just what you want even if you didn’t know you wanted it.

Some people just think they’re being paranoid, other people just think they’re crazy. What about you, the reader, how many times have you sat down and felt the overwhelming panic for no reason you could justify, or the fierce desire to pursue something with every fiber of your being? Now, out of those times, how many times have you written it off and done absolutely nothing about it? That’s your lemon, and I have a suggestion for you now as to how to make some lemonade out of it.

Yes, the road is long and full of stuff, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, or that it has even got a lot of lemons along the way. What life has is fruit, that’s all. Sure, sometimes that fruit is bitter, nasty; maybe it’s even rotten. How much you see of that fruit and whether or not it’s actually bitter depends on how far you’re willing to go to find out.

There are moments, no matter how brief, that life has set in front of you. This is not life kicking you when you are down; this is not life being unfair. This is life giving you a challenge. This is life seeing just how far you’ll go, and how hard you’ll try. This is you, being put in a position where you are going to have your meddle tested and possibly everything you thought you knew about yourself and where you were going be challenged, this is the moment where, at least for now, you find your edge – and this, my readers, is not a bad thing.

To restate my position: Yes, life will, sometimes, lead you to a lemon, but that’s no reason to ignore all the other damn fruit out there just because you’re convinced you might get a lemon. If you do that, you’ll never experience anything new. If you do that, you’re effectively giving up on life, because you’ve convinced yourself it’s just too scary.

Yes, you might get sour bites. Yes, you might get burned. Yes, it might hurt and it might hurt a lot. If you lay down, if you take that, if you pull the blankets up over your head and hide, then you’re choosing to lie with your lemons. That’s your choice.

If you’re willing to look at what’s in front of you, look at the rocks you’re dropping around yourself and climb over them; if you’re willing to put yourself face to face with your fear, if you’re willing to stand toe to toe with a, very real, prospect of pain, if you’re willing to risk something ‘bad’ (because what’s really bad in the long run is terribly suggestive) happening to you in order to find out what’s out there, then you know what you’ve figured out how to do?

You’ve really figured out how to make lemonade and now you only have one thing left to do:
Drink up and enjoy.