Life is not like a box of chocolates…it’s more like a carton of eggs
Forrest Gump’s infamous line is not entirely accurate when he stated that, like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get in life. This tells that the chocolate assortment is dictated and you have no choice in the matter but to choose from the selections given. It may be appropriate for a box of chocolate but this fateful perspective shouldn’t be extrapolation to life. An alternative view, and my preference, is that life is more like a carton of eggs—it’s a basic ingredient to make whatever you want. Want ‘em hard-boiled, scrambled, sunny-side up or even a whole dang chocolate cake, you’re gonna need eggs. From simple cooking recipes, my daughter and I have learned three different lessons about life.
No guarantee of success. My daughter and I decided to make Pavlova, a Meringue-based cake, for dinner guests one night. It requires a lot of eggs to make Meringue. Like the Band-Aid phase she went through when she was three years-old, my daughter gets a lot of satisfaction from cracking eggs. Not sure why, but whatever. As she carefully separated the yoke from the whites, one of them broke. I told her to spoon it out and continue. Then we whipped and whipped and whipped. One of our culinary-astute guests smiled and said, “Your egg whites were contaminated. Were the eggs room temperature?” My daughter and I looked at each other with blank expressions and I thought to myself, Meringue is like a friend I know: low tolerance, high maintenance. I guess dumping all that sugar into the whites all-at-once didn’t help, either. We tried to resuscitate the Meringue but too much air due to excessive whipping and low temperature baking proved ineffective. It was DOA. Saved for the fresh fruit and the whipped cream, the Pavlova was a complete and utter, yet delicious disaster!
Serendipity is your friend. On one rainy afternoon, we decided to stay in to bake a cake. Midway through, we run out of the listed ingredients: baking powder, white sugar, vanilla and some other small quantity stuff. While baking may be an exact and precise science, we treated it like a chemistry project: brown sugar for white; maple syrup for vanilla extract and chocolate chips for cocoa powder. The tough one was baking powder as we didn’t want our concoction to turn into a dense 9-inch cookie. But we did have baking soda! I looked for something citrusy to activate the baking soda and found oranges. What was supposed to be a simple chocolate cake turned out to be a tangy angel food-like cake. Our hodgepodge batter was created out of pure serendipity and it wasn’t half bad!
Life really is a Tabula Rasa: our experiences come from external perceptions and attitude, not from some built-in, pre-populated, predefined choices of others. Life is not a step-by-step cookbook either. To get the right outcomes, kids will have to try, fail and repeat. Often.
Failure is not the end; it’s the start of something different. By chance, I found a store-bought package of easy cake mix in my kitchen. It must have come from my sister as I don’t remember buying it. Well, as with anything pre-measured and predefined, it is very unforgiving when you add new ingredients. Wanting to spice things up, we decided to augment the cake mixture with other things. The result was inedible and my daughter still reminds me to this day, how awful that chocolate cake I made was. We threw it away after two bites (it was that bad!) and went searching for desserts only to discover a nearby bakery with petite and creative sweets. If it wasn’t for our domestic mishap, we might not have noticed this little tucked away shop.
These three lessons combined simply remind me that life really is a Tabula Rasa: our experiences come from external perceptions and attitude, not from some built-in, pre-populated, predefined choices of others. Yet, just because we are the author of that experience, not every choice will end optimally. But, not every action will end in disaster, either. This is why it’s essential to increasingly allow children to make more meaningful choices and let the consequences guide their actions. And by choices, I am not referring to children choosing outfits for school or from a restaurant menu; these are counterfeit choices masking as empowerment while confining their decisions to a breadbox. We’re talking about real age-appropriate choices whose decisions can actually fork their road. If they don’t see the relationship between themselves and the direct correlation of their actions, they cannot take ownership of anything.
Making decision is like anything kids do: they need practice. No kid jumps onto a two-wheeler and rides away the first time. Kids will make mistakes and they will make bad choices, too. Make sure you are there so that their choices are recoverable. This is especially so for girls who are further shielded from things that are deemed dangerous or rebellious. Life has no owner’s manual; no step-by-step cookbook either. To get the recipe right, they’d have to try, fail and repeat. Often. Even if there are crib notes, they may discover that the notes need to be revised or start anew. That’s very much not a bad thing! Don’t like the box of chocolates? Get a new box. Better yet, learn to make truffles. If they do, the concoction they create will be sweeter than the finest confectioneries ever put into a box!
