When Life Gives You Lemons
Dexter York
March 2019
We all have heard this old proverbial phrase: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Lemons symbolize sourness or difficulty in life while lemonade suggests turning negativity into something positive. This phrase has been used so often, some of us no longer feel its significance.
Life is nowhere near easy. Something always happens – good and bad. When good things happen, we accept them without thinking twice. We consider them normal, but when bad things happen, it is harder to accept and often we consider them abnormal. Dealing with negativity is part of life and it should be done so in a healthy way. Is it worth milking five minutes of negativity and letting it affect your entire day to a degree that you label it as a bad day? Every time we let bad events consume us, we only hurt ourselves. Other people will not care about our problems, some people will even be glad we have problems because it makes them feel better about themselves.
There are times in life when accepting negativity can be the only thing we can do. Not every situation can be turned around; negative events sometimes can only go one way. One such event is losing someone. When we lose someone, we experience grief. Grief is like a ball in a box and sometimes the ball gets bigger, but the box stays the same. In those times we can feel the ball pressing against the sides of the box and it hurts. There are days when the ball is small and days when the ball is too big; it never goes away, it only changes size.
Self-awareness goes a long way. Awareness gives us the opportunity to understand a situation, and it allows us to act with intention. When we experience a response to a negative event, we need to take a step back and think:
Accepting the presence of negativity with self-awareness will give us the opportunity to live a healthier life.
We all have heard this old proverbial phrase: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Lemons symbolize sourness or difficulty in life while lemonade suggests turning negativity into something positive. This phrase has been used so often, some of us no longer feel its significance.
Life is nowhere near easy. Something always happens – good and bad. When good things happen, we accept them without thinking twice. We consider them normal, but when bad things happen, it is harder to accept and often we consider them abnormal. Dealing with negativity is part of life and it should be done so in a healthy way. Is it worth milking five minutes of negativity and letting it affect your entire day to a degree that you label it as a bad day? Every time we let bad events consume us, we only hurt ourselves. Other people will not care about our problems, some people will even be glad we have problems because it makes them feel better about themselves.
There are times in life when accepting negativity can be the only thing we can do. Not every situation can be turned around; negative events sometimes can only go one way. One such event is losing someone. When we lose someone, we experience grief. Grief is like a ball in a box and sometimes the ball gets bigger, but the box stays the same. In those times we can feel the ball pressing against the sides of the box and it hurts. There are days when the ball is small and days when the ball is too big; it never goes away, it only changes size.
Self-awareness goes a long way. Awareness gives us the opportunity to understand a situation, and it allows us to act with intention. When we experience a response to a negative event, we need to take a step back and think:
- What exactly happened
- Why it happened
- Could we have done something to prevent it from happening?
- Are we feeling angry?
- Are we feeling sad?
- Is it significant enough to let it impact us longer than it exists?
- Should we accept it the way it is or can it be turned around?
- Should we turn it around?
- Is it worth keeping it in our memory?
Accepting the presence of negativity with self-awareness will give us the opportunity to live a healthier life.