Zest

To most people, life is not always easy.

There are - and will be - times when you don’t get what you want or feel you deserve. The recognition. The pay. The outcome of your efforts. The love of the one person in your dreams.

Sure, everybody knows someone who seems to slide through life as if nothing could ever go wrong for them – winning the prize on the church raffle, getting the last ticket to that much coveted concert, having their book published at first attempt. But maybe that’s just because they value what goes right, they’re thankful for it, and make the best of what went wrong.

It’s the attitude that marks the difference, as strongly as if it carried one big dark X on its back. When something goes wrong, one can simply put their hands down and sob on how life is unfair, wallowing in their disappointment. Or one can analyze why things went wrong and take it as a lesson for next time. Polarized attitudes.
Some things can’t be thoroughly analyzed - like the lottery results or someone’s decision that you don’t understand; things that fall into the category of ‘unprocessable’. But those won’t be the majority, and the way one reacts to them also makes a difference. All lessons, hard or easy, have their value. If one can extract the zest of it, all will be precious.

Life gives and will continue to give you lemons. You can hold the lemon in your hand and cry to the wind on how sour it is… or you can take it to the kitchen, use the zest to bake a cake, then squeeze the juice and make some salad dressing.

Life is all about what you make of your lemons. Life is what you make it.