They say that when life gives you lemons… well, we all know what to do.
This morning while writing at the cafe, I was struck by a funny variation on this:
“Don’t expect to make lemonade out of vinegar.*”
What I mean by this is, don’t expect something that feels good to come out of something that feels bad**.
To be clear, I believe in making the best of everything in life. I frequently make lemonade out of lemons… both figuratively and literally.*** It is one thing to make the best of a situation that is challenging. It is another trying to make something turn into something it is not ever going to be.
Vinegar is never going to turn into lemonade.
Personally, there were times I tried to force outcomes that, in hindsight, were equally as impossible as the analogy suggests. For instance, as a performer and music artist, I often operated on the assumption that I wanted to be out performing and selling my music as my main career activity. As it turns out, it seems I am far more suited to be a piano teacher, at least as my main gig. For a long time, I made things hard on myself by assuming I wanted something else. Maybe I thought I should want something else. Once I got honest about my true preferences, once I found what truly suits me, life became a lot clearer because I was no longer trying to force that square peg into that, you know, round hole.
There’s a great saying from Abraham-Hicks: You can’t get there from here.**** It means, when you are out of alignment, you aren’t going to attract what you want. There has to be a vibrational match first. You gotta get happy! People often get confused about this, unaware that they are got a vibration going that is very different from where they say they want to be. I did this for a long time. The frustration and confusion of this ultimately has propelled me to become an avid student of these principles of thought.
There are areas of life where I am consistently in a high vibration, areas such as blogging, exercise, creating, and teaching. These areas have been very instructive in how true alignment works.
In those areas I never tried to turn vinegar into lemonade.
Instead, I just tossed it onto some salad with some olive oil and salt. Much better.
*For some reason, I pictured the vinegar in a small grey metal bowl like I grew up with in our house. We would often put the dogs’ water in it.
**No offense to vinegar. It’s just an analogy.
***Incidentally, lemon is my wife’s favorite. Consquently, over the past year I have cooked a lot of lemon dishes and made a lot of lemonade.
****I wrote a post about this idea here.