Life – the Lord, actually – has been handing me lemons.
Say what you want about lemons. They are sour. They make your hands sticky. And if you get lemon juice in your eyes, watch out. The burn is like few others. So what better a metaphor for all the crazy, sticky, sour, painful situations in our lives than a lemon?
I have, as of late, found myself in a few. Estranged from people I love, but who I now realize I need distance from. Estranged from friends who I never imagined my life without. Moved to another state. Once again, isolated. What ever could I do with these lemons? How to I find the sweet spot in this – the place where all of this is okay for me again?
What do you do when life – the Lord, actually – hands you lemons?
You make lemonade.
Making lemonade isn’t easy though. You’ve got to juice those lemons. You’ve got to get all the ingredients – water, sugar and whatever extra. You’ve got to figure out that ratio of sweet to sour – not so sweet that you’re just drinking yellow sugar water and not so tangy that your basically drinking lemon water. Maybe, you’ve gotta follow a recipe (or the youtube/instagram guru) You’ve got to find the “sweet spot.”
And so it is with life’s lemons – your heartache, your anguish, your pain and your failings. Those lemons aren’t just gonna make themselves into Lemonade. You have to work for it. You have to do the work to heal those parts of you that threaten to turn you bitter and sour on life. You have to get to therapy. Maybe, you just to talk to someone – anyone – outside of yourself. You have to try that self-help tip. Then maybe try another. And then tweak it to work for you. You’ve got to dig deep an find that self-love. Make it a priority to reclaim your time and your space and your joy. And you have to add and remove people, places and elements to your life until your find that sweet spot; located somewhere between joy and pain where we live on the half-line – content. Letting life happen and learning her lessons – and accepting her fleeting emotions – without letting ourselves get too wrapped up in any one of them. Finding that… sweet spot.
And maybe in the end of it all, we don’t end up with lemonade. Maybe, although everyone else is making lemonade from their lemons, we make lemon cake. Like, maybe we don’t have to convert our pain into the same path as everyone else. Maybe we can transform our pain in ways much more different than someone else and still find something sweet in the process. And maybe that is the whole point.