As the head chef of my household, the primary objective with all of my culinary creations is volume. How many days can one tolerate the same meal? And/or, can I freeze it for a future delight?
Check and check!
During the summer months, those meals generally incorporate the grill, but during the winter months it means homemade soups and sauces. Naturally, all the good stuff ends up at the bottom, so my instructions are pretty clear.
Stir from the bottom!
This has become such a joke in my family that I now have a cup memorializing my sage advice.
Over time it occurred to me, this is a great metaphor for how I find love and gratitude. I stir from the bottom.
For me, love is a very broad word. At the top of the list is how you emotionally and physically feel when you share love with a partner, spouse, child, and others. For now, I am leaving that aside.
The love I am talking about comes from giving or receiving appreciation, respect, kindness, excitement, friendship, and warmth. All things that rise to the top.
It is within the contentment derived from those feelings where I find the warmth of love.
Feeling the love in those times dishes up a huge helping of gratitude because they connect to each other. Just like an amazing appetizer is the start to a great meal. When love resonates with such ease, gratitude is a natural reaction.
When I was a kid, I heard I needed to count my blessings because there are others less fortunate. My childhood was not structured around religious conformity, so I didn’t fully grasp the intention of that until much later in life when I connected blessings to love and gratitude. (This is my personal experience and in no way a disregard to religious conformity nor the religious meaning of blessings.)
Embracing and connecting them as true feelings took a lot of time and maturity.
What if all the good stuff is at the bottom?
Can we find love and gratitude in despair or heartache?
Back in the days of my life when I often threw myself a self-imposed pity-party, I couldn’t find either. My backward way was so convoluted, that I would sit in troubled agony for days until my friends asked me the precise proper question. Not until then, could I unload my burden.
When they proclaimed, ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ My reply was always the same, ‘You didn’t ask.’
Fortunately, I haven’t thrown myself a pity-party in decades.
I outgrew that egregious behavior in my late 30’s and today, my overly sunny disposition finds something to love in everything, even when I must stir from the bottom.
If I stir from the bottom, even the smallest spec of light at the end of a long tunnel consumed by darkness can change my perspective. I have faced and endured hardships but if I focus on the spec of light rather than be consumed by the darkness, eventually I emerge to find myself in the light.
Love and gratitude don’t take away the hardships that indelibly exist, rather they provide a different lens through which to view them.
I have rationalized many things in my life to overcome the darkness. In the end the facts remain the facts, it is my perception of them that changes. In those times, the spec of light becomes a beautiful ray of sunshine.
Next time you make a gallon sized pot of chili or spaghetti sauce, be sure to give me a nod when you stir from the bottom.
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