Balancing the Adding and Subtracting

Amuse-Bouche: When life gives you lemons, you can either have a sour face, or squeeze them and make lemonade.

Entrée: How many times haven’t we been through certain roads where we don’t feel comfortable walking through? There are moments in our life, where things seem to go sour and all we are looking for is that little sweetness to cross our path. Now, life is all about a balance. We can’t have too much of one thing and less than other. To me, what comes to mind as I write this is the process a pastry chef encounters when baking or exercises any kind of pastry. Most of the recipes in pastry call for a certain measurement of ingredient. If we add too much of something, or less than others, it will throw the outcome of the product off. That’s why we have to be careful and pay attention on what we are doing, but the tricky part about all of this is when we have our problems. They just don’t show up when everything is going wells and calm. It seems to happen when other things are going on at the same time. Just like a busy night service in the restaurant. Many things are going on at once, things like special request, little details on certain orders, dealing with issues that the wait staff might have, a chef yelling because either the production line isn’t moving to its best capability or plates aren’t going out consistent. Plus, how can we forget working under a hot environment? A place where ovens are cranked to 350 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, grills, hot sauté pans and blasting fire are at its fullest heat. Cooks yelling at each other to make sure orders are getting complete while still cooking upcoming orders. This more goes on at the same time, and surely could turn out to be the best ingredients that lays the icing on the cake to a stressful environment, which can boil up, and will be ready to diploid its WHAMM at any moment, this is the moment where one can lose focus. You can see this description as the way problems are presented in your life. Let that be personal, or social, outer or inner issues or other things, they all start creeping up on you or just show up at once. Now it’s up to us to have a positive attitude, a focus and calm outlook on taking things. Otherwise all of the orders that you have to cook during a busy Saturday night service will backfire at you and you will find yourself deeper in the whole then when you first stepped in. Now let me ask you a question. Imagine a life where everything runs fine and dandy? We would get tired of perfection, we will become bored of walking outside all the time and all we see is a sunny day, birds chirping, grass always lively green. If that was to be our everyday life, then we will be and feel handicapped at some point. We wouldn’t know to fix bad grass; we wouldn’t enjoy a cloudy day with rain that will nourish that brown messed up looking grass. Or give us a free car wash or cool us from a beating sunny day. That’s why we need a balance of good and bad. Even though when we are living in our down time and all we want is for the sun to rise and begin a brand new better day, it is necessary for us to go through bad situations so we can learn and gain wisdom to share with others. If we really think about it, the sun shines more for us. When the night comes around, most of the time we are sleeping and aren’t really aware of it, allow me to take it a step further. We as humans spend more time awake and moving under the sun then darkness. More time under the sunshine then in the silent night, but quite often we don’t see it that way, this is nothing new but a routine we live in our everyday life. Nothing will last forever, issues, struggles, and problems will come and go. It’s up to us to learn from them and live to help others. Like they say “you live and you learn.” Always try to remember your winds may be someone else’s storms.

Dessert: Life will hand you a mystery box with many ingredients in it. Now it is up to us to make something out of them. Things will not get done by just looking at them and not try to fix something from what’s in front of you. Why not give it a try. What do you got to lose? Failure is not to have tried and not succeeded, but to never have tried at all. You may not be as creative as other people, but you know what’s in your ingredient box more than anyone.