Deep Thoughts; What to do with the Lemons

On a bus ride home on Tuesday evening, I was reminded of the lemons sitting idle in the fridge at home and turning yellow signifying that their end is near. I got thinking about what to do with them and thought of making lemonade. I have never made lemonade before so I started imagining the whole process and a sudden thought flashed through my mind.

“When life hands you lemons make lemonade”

It’s an idiom I have heard flung around a couple of times but never given much thought to besides the surface meaning of it encouraging optimism in the face of adversity. Thanks to me imagining how to make lemonade, I started giving much thought to that quote and to be completely clear on my thought process, I decided to find out how to really make lemonade and see how it can be applied to life-lemons. Thank God for google, I found a quick recipe.

Here it is let’s look at it together;

The first thing I noticed is that making lemonade requires a process. Initially, I had thought it was just a combination of lemon, sugar, and water but on reading various recipes, I found out that it would only make the sugar settle at the bottle of the jar but we will get to that in a minute. In life, we need to recognize that it would take us passing through a process to convert our life-melons into sumptuous life-lemonades. Oh dear me, I haven’t even said what life-lemons or life-lemonades (what I will be calling lifemonades from now) mean to me. Life-lemons are adversity, misfortune, challenges; in short, all things that seem to make us have bad moods. This is because lemons are ascribed with bitterness. Lifemonade, on the other hand, is sweetness, refreshing atmosphere, awesomeness, victory, joy, name any positive feeling. Yeah, you got that right. Anything that makes us feel like we are on top of the world.

Now that we are on the same page, we can go on ahead making lifemonades. From the recipe above, first is the sugar. Sugar is anything that gives peace and laughter; Praying, reading, watching *insert favourite videos*, singing, friends, etc. For me, talking to God is definitely peaceful especially when I take solitary walks and of course watching anime and hanging out with friends which always brings laughter with it. The sugar helps us get beyond the bitterness of the lemons and let’s not forget we need to subject it to heat.

Then, we are on to extracting the juice from the lemons which is one of the most important parts. Pressing, cutting and squeezing the lemons until every drop is out. This is equivalent to recognizing, analysing and understanding the life-lemons. We definitely have to recognize them for what they are before opening them up for analysis. This might require certain tools to be used, a knife and a juicer which translates to tools or methods we need in sourcing for understanding our lemons and one method I can suggest would be to Shine on the green light. In as much as a lemon can be sour or bitter, it can add flavour,  texture, colour, and smell to things and we see that when we shine on the green light.

Finally, we combine everything together with water (cold/ice). This process is the diluting process which signifies the actions we take from results gotten from shining on the green light. Taking positive steps as we work from the positive point of view and voila, we have a delicious lifemonade prepared for consumption.

But you know, I got home that day, took a glance at the lemons and decided to make Banana-Apple-Plum Smoothie. It was quite delicious I tell you. The question is why I didn’t make lemonade. Well, I could have and might another time but I also had bananas, apples, and plums in the fridge too and I decided to focus on them instead. What I do believe is that in life when we get lemons handed to us, we could make lemonade or better still look at what else we got and make something sweeter and much more creative. Even when life is full of lemons, there are good and beautiful things around us if we really look. But what if we got only lemons for real? Well, there are other interesting options I came across below.

“When life gives you lemons, you don’t make lemonade. You use the seeds to plant a whole orchard – an entire franchise! Or you could just stay on the Destiny Bus and drink lemonade someone else has made, from a can.” – Anthon St Maarten

Really? Anthon, we would get much more lemons to sell just like a rapper gets street credit from going to prison then goes to prison again to get more street credit… wouldn’t go near this one at all. On to the next one…

“When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! GET MAD! ‘I don’t want your lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?!’ Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am?! I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!” — Cave Johnson, The 2011 video game Portal 2

Hmmm! Some Genetic Engineering. People! Let’s start inventing with some lemons.

Jaa Mata!