When Life Hands You Lemons...

Throw them back and say “catch!”  Unless they also come with sugar, a juicer, and a pitcher, lemons are pretty useless in and of themselves.

Been thinking a lot recently about the phrases people use to try to cheer each other up.  Some of them are cute, some are meant to make you feel better, some are simply said because the person doesn’t know what to say.  Very few of them have any value in real day to day life.

As a counselor I hear people use trite sayings and ’motivational’ phrases all of the time, but how much do they really work?  Most research tends to point to the fact that the only person who gets a happy feeling from motivational sayings is the person espousing them.  People tend to react in a positive way to specific praise and motivation, not so much to generalizations. Personally, I mostly swore off of them after hearing a mother say the lemon thing to her suicidal daughter at a hospital intake one night.  The look on the daughter’s face pretty much was a combination of utter disbelief and disgust, and completely mirrored what was in my thoughts at the moment.

So, instead of cute little motivational phrases, how do we motivate ourselves to change?

You hear many people talking about being ‘in the moment’, or being ‘present’ in their lives.  Many of us wander around on autopilot every day.  We do what we have to do to keep a roof over our heads and the light bill paid, but we rarely lift our heads up to see if there is anything else out there.  Unfortunately for quite a few people, the natural curiosity of trying to see what else there has been beaten into submission by a world and by well-meaning people who don’t have the ability, the courage, or the desire to imagine what else is out there.

The world is a place of infinite possibility and continuous reinvention and the more we try to deny that the less we really live, and the smaller our lives become. 

So when life hands you lemons remember that ‘life’ has handed you nothing.  You decide what you need and want-and if its important enough you will get there without the trite sayings or ‘motivational’  posters that everyone loves so much, but with the help of people who understand you and care about you no matter what life's handed you recently.