There is a mistake that I’ve made a lot of different times in my life, one that leads from the thought “just one more.” Thankfully, nowadays the only consequence of this is that after whatever episode of whatever show I’m watching is over I have that one more while sitting at my computer and sacrificing sleep for making sure that I’m not missing anything that is happening in the world.
Occasionally, however, things go a bit further. Sometimes I fall down some sort of rabbit hole and either discover all sorts of new music or all sorts of new knowledge. Today I found myself learning quite a bit that I didn’t know about lemons. The earliest known lemons seem to have originated in South Asia around the 2nd century AD. They were first cultivated substantially in Spain in the 15th century as a possible means of treating scurvy and were brought to the New World as part of the Spanish conquests of the early 1500’s.
Most interestingly, it has been discovered that lemons are not genetically naturally occurring. They are hybrid made by cross breeding a bitter orange and a citron.
It has therefore been scientifically proven that life does not, in fact, hand you lemons.
Does that therefore make the platitude any less truthful? Of course not. I remain a firm believer that much of our happiness is determined not by what may happen to us but by how we react to that and that in many cases negative things in our lives are the result of our own actions and decisions.
The first step to any of us “making lemonade” is to acknowledge that it was probably our choices that led to “life handing us a lemon” to begin with. This is in no way meant to imply that anybody deserves anything bad that happens to them or to ignore the role of random chance and plain old bad luck. I just feel that too often people choose to look for someone or something else to blame for their lives not being what they had hoped them to be.
I’ve gotten a lot of shit for this philosophy over the years but I don’t believe that things happen for a reason. I think that most of the time things happen because of something that someone did. Maybe it’s not always obvious but somebody did something and there were eventual consequences. They may have been inadvertent, but they happened.
Other times things just happen because they happen, a roll of the cosmic die that didn’t go our way. I don’t know if it’s cynicism, bitterness, or just a self-defense mechanism that those of us that work in healthcare employ but after so many years of seeing bad things happen to people I refuse to believe that there is any order to it.
If you do, that’s OK too. I have friends reading this that believe that everything that happens in life is part of God’s plan and that we are better for it, no matter how horrible. There are other’s that scoff at that notion as make believe and think that it’s arrogance to assume we have any more significance to the greater scheme of things than that tomato plant in our garden or the rabbit in the backyard. I don’t know which of them are right, if either is, but they both seem pretty content with their philosophies and to the best of my knowledge live pretty happy lives.
Maybe nature or fate or life or whatever never intended us to have lemons but we do. No matter who’s running the show, if anyone, sometimes life sure does seem to suck but it’s up to us to determine how we deal with that. Sometimes it’s by making lemonade. Other times, a vodka lemon drop.
Tonight I’m thinking a whiskey sour.
—
Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com and is republished on Medium.
—
The post Life Doesn’t Actually Hand You Lemons appeared first on The Good Men Project.
