The case for making lemonade
It’s true: A little bitter fruit can lead to positive outcomes, with the right attitude
It was one of those hot, listless August days when summer holidays seem about two weeks too long. The kids, bored, wanted to do a lemonade stand.
“Great!” I said, “Lemonade stand, it is!” I was thinking well, this won’t take much.
It did. It took what the business guys call resources; it is after all, a little business. It took a trip to the store to get a half dozen cans of lemonade, and a search through the cupboard to find the right sized pitcher. Then there was the ice thing and another trip to the store to get cardboard. “We need a sign!” the older guy said, the little marketer/advertiser guy inside him speaking. We had to drag a table and one or two chairs out to the street. Cost? $10.50. Labour? Not sure. Overall, not bad.
This was a good lesson for the kids, not just about business, salesmanship and co-operation but about lemons, the bitter little fruit that you can turn into something really good (and apparently a money-magnet. Just wait.) And about overcoming the less-than-positive. Life is chock full of lemons: the purposeless day; the failing report card; the slippery slope of no trust in a relationship; the loss of a child or a friend; illness; death.
Lemons bring back some memories. One day, while driving, I heard a radio call-in show, featuring a psychiatrist, someone I knew in fact. The topic was the use of Valium and its anti-anxiety cousins; benzodiazepines, they’re called. A caller was explaining to the doctor that she took 40 milligrams of the pill per day, a pretty large amount. When he questioned her gently about why she’d take so much, she said, “life’s been so unfair to me!” There was a pause and then he replied, “Who told you your life is going to be fair? It’ll be interesting and boring, exciting and dull, happy and sad for sure ... but never fair. Who told you that? Go give that person a piece of your mind!”
Great words, thanks. I’ve used them myself a few times.
The thing is with life’s unfairness’s, those lemons, you can mostly do something about them. You could of course just forget about them, but what good is that? Kind of like learning something then deliberately
erasing it. To be fair, there are sayings that extol the virtue of just living in the present. You’ve read them, generally with little hearts and flowers pasted all over them, like on a crocheted doily hanging on grandma’s wall. “The past is long gone, the future is blah blah blah, but we have the gift of today. That’s why we call it the present.”
It’s not a bad sentiment, and there’s value in living in the here and now, but there’s just as much wisdom in dealing with the negative or the past, often by ascribing meaning or ritual to it, by acknowledging pain where it exists, making it as much a positive as possible. That’s the engine behind truth and reconciliation movements. Behind commemorating those lost by genocide. That’s the engine behind even the most pedestrian of activities, making a lemonade stand on otherwise endless, listless summer days.
There’s a bunch of people, me included, who root for the let’s-makelemons option. One of its major proponents was Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and another psychiatrist, with wisdom for the ages. He believed that man is the only animal that gives events meaning. I’m not sure about the only animal (elephants have a ritual when one of their herd dies for example) but he’s right about meaning.
A woman sought his help one day, complaining that she couldn’t stop crying, the product of her grief over
the loss of her husband months before. I’ll paraphrase the exchange.
“I shouldn’t be crying so long!” she said.
“Did you love your husband?” She replied, “Oh yes, very much!” “Then, let’s think of your tears as a way to build a monument to him. The more you loved him, the more the tears, the larger the monument. It’s wrong to set a time limit for them you know, rather think of them in a positive light.”
She did. She did the better thing: she ascribed new meaning to her undeniable sadness, allowed herself to grieve, felt better.
Oh, the kids? They did really well, surprising even their Papa who generally has high hopes for these guys. Something like $45 came in, which, taking off the $10.50, gave the kids over $30 (these are rough figures; math is not my long suit) in what we might call profit. But the overall value was way beyond thirty bucks: quite suddenly, the day was filled with purpose and the summer seemed happier, not too long at all.
Mostly though, there was this big life-lemon lesson.
Dave Davis, MD, lives in Dundas, Ontario and Fort Myers Beach, Florida. He’s a husband, father, and grandfather, retired physician, writer and speaker. You can write him at drdavedavis@gmail.com. He likes it when you write.