Take the Rough with the Smooth
The bad thing about life is that it has its ups and downs. The good thing about it is that it has its ups and downs. Nope, I didn't just make an extensive typo. It's exactly what I wanted to write. Of course, nobody wants troubles in their lives, everyone wants everything easy, smooth sailing all the time, but we all know we can't have that. The "grand scheme of things" doesn't have that in its outline. Bad things are kind of like a counterbalance, something that grounds us and tells us that life isn't fair. It's the one thing that makes us do a double-take and re-evaluate what we've been doing so far. It's the result of the mistakes we committed, commit, and will continue to commit. We can't have butterflies and sunshine all our lives. As they say, life's not all beer and skittles. We strive for that, yes, but it's near-impossible, so why not just make the most out of a bad situation?
"When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." It was during my fourth year in high school that I always heard this, and I guess there are a very few souls who haven't gotten a whiff of this aphorism. I don't really wonder why because it's the most--dare I say logical?--thing to do when you're in some sort of fuckity circumstance.
When your mobile phone gets confiscated (HS scenario), you frown and whine for a little while, then you shrug your worry off and tell yourself that at least you'd only be getting a verbal warning. A lemon thrown, a quarter of your glass is filled with lemonade.
When you fail an exam, learn from it and study harder. Another lemon, another quarter.
When there's a big sale and you've already maxed out your credit card, two words: window shop. More lemon, more lemonade.
There are lots of ways to cope with the crap that life keeps pitching our way. Things aren't always so bad...it's just how we look at them. We can whine all we want--I admit, it's sometimes fun to complain--we can blame others all we want, but in the end, we're still the ones who should learn how to slice the fruit and squeeze out the juice. By the time we're wise enough to realize that that might probably be what life is all about, we already have saved enough money to buy an entire country from selling all those lemonade.
There's still another thing we can do, though. As I've said before, there's the coping mechanism, the other's our inherent fighting mechanism. Instead of going with the flow and adapting to what's going on, we move against the current and do things the way we want to do them, provided that we are armed with good intentions. A professor shoots down your political argument--Fight!--you stick to your stuff and prove your idea instead of just telling yourself that the professor is right...simply because he's licensed to teach and should know the right answers. Shit, zero; you, one.
That said, I guess we can modify the earlier adage a wee bit. "When life throws you lemons, throw them back until you get the oranges you originally asked for." Either's fine, though I'd much rather prefer the second one. But that's just me.
...I guess I just like oranges more than lemons...
~
Take the rough with the smooth - good things and bad things
Edit (May 13, 2009): That reddened line is from here. Finally I found it! Although of course, what I wrote obviously missed a few words.
Paola @ 8:43 PM
