Perhaps during the recent quarantine, you decided to try a new recipe. You scrolled through Pinterest or even an old-fashioned cookbook until a picture caught your eye and made your mouth water. That was the one! You imagined how delicious it would be and how much your family would enjoy something new.
Off you went to the fridge and the pantry to pull together the ingredients to make this entirely new dish. You found most of them and made a quick, masked run to the market for the few that were missing.
You prepared the dish and, while it didn’t look exactly like the picture, it was delicious, and everyone cheered your effort. You vowed to put it into the regular rotation and to work on the tricky bit that stopped it being the work of art in the photo. Or maybe you didn’t like it at all and marked it up to experience.
Making changes to your life requires pretty much the same steps:
- Feel a need for something new.
- Get a clear picture of the change you desire.
- Look inside yourself for the “right stuff.”
- Go out and get anything that’s missing.
- Put the ingredients together in the right proportions and order.
- Access the results.
- Adjust as necessary.
When something in our lives isn’t working, we tend to think we need to scrap everything and get a whole new life. But what do you make a new life from, anyway? Just like dinner, you can make something entirely new from familiar ingredients, put together in a different way.
Flour, butter, sugar, and salt seem ordinary and not appetizing at all on their own, but put together in different proportions, with other different foods, and cooking methods they can make anything. Many times, we look at the elements of our lives and don’t see anything particularly exciting there, just like those basic ingredients of cooking. We think will never accomplish the big goals we have for ourselves because we don’t have what it takes.
Not true!
Your vision of your perfect life springs from who you are. The time and place of your birth are part of you. So are your likes and dislikes, the knowledge and experiences you have pursued. Every circumstance and relationship has crafted you. Just as a recipe would be dull without something as basic as salt, you wouldn’t be you if any experience from your past were missing.
If you didn’t have what it takes to fulfill your heart’s desire, your heart wouldn’t desire it. Your personality, talents, skills, and experience all came to gather to create that longing in you. After all, if you’re looking for something new for dinner and you hate chicken, you won’t go for the Coq Au Vin recipe, no matter how great the photography!
Take a step back from the restless need for change you are feeling, take time to rummage in the cupboards and dig through the cold storage of your life to see what’s there. Get to know yourself. Love and appreciate who you are. If you need to learn something, gain some experience, or go to a new place to accomplish your goal, that’s part of the process of becoming more of the person you are meant to be. Those changes will be fun and exciting for you, even if they are a little bit scary at first, because they express who you are.
Don’t be afraid to try something new if it looks attractive to you. Don’t give up if your first try isn’t perfect. Don’t think you have failed if you turn out not to like it at all. It’s about learning and growing and becoming all you can be, all you want to be.
You don’t make a new recipe every night. Most of the time, we go for the convenient, the comfortable, the familiar, but now and then we want to shake it up. Right now, it feels right to reassess our lives and incorporate the new ingredients handed to us by the corona virus. You’ve got everything else you need to make something new and special!
Cool Like Christ 