S05E087, Lemonade and Life, Andy B 2 Minute Video
There’s a line in the film Kung Fu Panda. The Master is speaking with his trainee. The trainee feels fierce and tough and hard. He’s talking about how he can make all sorts of things happen, like where a tree can grow.
The Master simply replies that while he can have power to choose where a tree may grow, he can’t control what will grow – if a peach seed is planted, then a peach tree can grow.
All the power and skill in the world can not change make those sorts of choices.
Life throws things at us all the time. And when things do not go as planned there are a couple of choices we can make. And, make no mistake, they are choices - no matter how we feel about them.
We can choose to stamp our feet and get angry about what has unfolded before us. Or we can choose to accept what we can not do, and deal with what we can.
Hence the phrase When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.
There is one more thing that we can do, however, that will seek to mitigate these insurmountable and unexpected issues.
In our home we call it “front loading”. Simply put it means getting done what you can, when you can, with what you have. Another way would be to say ‘don’t leave everything until the last minute’.
We can’t control a whole range of things, but we can work diligently when that is possible.
So, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Don’t wait for them to become oranges. And, if you prefer orange aid to lemonade go buy some oranges ‘cos all the squeezing in the world of those lemons will not change their flavour.
Just a thought...
Andy B
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Transcript
[00:00:00] So another Andy B Two Minute Video. There's a phrase it, it sounds very American to me. It's When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade. Maybe that's not exactly the phrase, but that's the phrase that I remember. And of late, I've been applying that phrase to our life.
[00:00:24] When Life Gives You Lemons Make Lemonade, all it's saying is when you've got something in front that you need to deal with, you need to get it done. And sometimes what you get given to you isn't necessarily what you want to deal with.
[00:00:35] So, as a ministry that operates online, having a decent internet connection, is kind of a big deal, alright. And because I do radio work as well, I need to be able to get on air. I need to do interviews for people. We use Zoom for that so it's videos and I, I need to be able to say that at 10 o'clock I'm gonna have an interview, and that the internet is gonna work.
[00:00:53] We've had an internet system in our home for about eight years or so thereabouts, and it's stopped working. It's, it's not very [00:01:00] good anymore. It's been really, really unreliable. To the extent that the company's provided our internet services have even said, yeah, we can cancel your contract, it's not a problem. It's a few months old over a two year contract. That's how bad it's got. So we've got new internet coming, which is brilliant. We've got fiber optic cable coming.
[00:01:15] It's a social broadband tariff. If you're not sure what that is, you live in the UK, look up social broadband, look up OFCOM, which is kind of a watchdog for the government. O F C O M, OFCOM, the watchdog, and look for social broadband. It's good broadband, if you're on certain benefits and you can get it cheap, but good stuff. And that's what we've got.
[00:01:33] But got me thinking about on Thursday we were getting ready to go into Friday, and Saturday and our, our weeks kind of follow a pattern. So by Thursday we're basically finishing off, so that Friday is done, everything's uploaded, scheduled, so that on Saturday we can film new material for the BerryBunch. So when the internet didn't work on a Thursday, It actually is quite a big deal for us! It's not just a first world problem, it's a, I can't physically do the job that we're supposed to be doing here. I'm literally stuck.
[00:01:59] And I was chatting with [00:02:00] Nathan, what are we gonna do? And we are just thinking everything we need to do today involves a computer, and we haven't got access to the things that we need to have. It's not our fault.
[00:02:08] We've had a couple of software issues, an issue with the internet, and we've got a problem.
[00:02:12] So we've got on with other stuff!
[00:02:14] We've been cleaning the house, which is important. Doing other things because sometimes when life gives you lemons, you've just gotta make lemonade. You can get annoyed by the lemons 'cos you, want a banana, or a peach, or an apple but if life gives you lemons, make the most of it. Make some lemonade.
[00:02:28] In our case, we cleaned the house. We had a whole, all sorts of other stuff, graphic stuff that we could do with files that we had, so we'd worked really, really hard and diligently throughout the day. And on Friday we caught up.
[00:02:38] If Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.
[00:02:41] Whatever life's thrown at you, make the most of it 'cos every day is precious.
[00:02:46] Just a thought.
Andy B, 09/06/2023