Adventure Sister Stacy is an excellent friend. One reason for this is that she lets me know when she thinks I should try and step away from a situation to get a clearer picture. She tells me kindly “You’re in the soup. You can’t see everything from the inside. It’s time to step away and out of the pot, so you can see a bigger perspective.”
I love that she cares enough about me to tell me the truth when I am in a soupy situation.
Like most everyone, I tend to complain and vent to my best friend when life gets frustrating. I share with her because I can trust her to give me feedback from a different point of view. It’s like taste testing a spoonful of soup and asking. “What’s missing? What can I add to make this better?”
They say it is the journey and not the destination that we must find enjoyment in. It’s taken me years to figure out that’s because the journey is the process of planning and doing that almost always takes a much longer amount of your time and effort, before we finally get to our target aspirations. There we end only to start all over again towards another destination.
The journey is life! Life is the journey. I love to cook and that’s why I like to use cooking metaphors to express my messages and share my life lessons. My life is the soup and I am the chef on the journey to making the best, most scrumptious soul-warming soup I possibly can!
When I try to add too much to my soup of life, it becomes unbalanced and not nearly as tasty as a simple chicken soup with few tasty ingredients. That’s because the less ingredients and seasonings I add, the easier it is to experience the simple flavors that we savor.
Isn’t this also true of life? When we add too much to our lives its overwhelming and not as enjoyable as a simple, balanced life full of the people and activities that we enjoy.
Sometimes we think if we add ‘just a little more’, that we will be even happier and our soup of life will be all the better, yet that doesn’t happen. We end up wishing we had not added those things after all. But now they are in there… and you can’t take them out and you are stuck with the flavor, even though it just doesn’t taste right. This is when you are in the soup!
Now you’ve learned though, and you are not going to do that again! It’s still okay to eat this soup and so we do; because we invested our time and effort on the journey to make this soup. We may think we need to add just a little more of this or a pinch of that to make it ‘better’. When really, we just need to enjoy our chef’s journey. Learn to enjoy the feeling of contentment our simply delicious, homemade chicken soup truly brings to our lives.
That the best thing about soup! It can be the same or different every single time, depending on how the chef is feeling that day! I hardly ever make the same soup twice because I don’t like to use recipes. My daughter once said to me, after tasting a delicious homemade concoction. “I am sad because I know, I just had the best soup of my life and I will never taste it again.”
That’s because there was no recipe, same as life, it was handcrafted by the Chef’s spirit that lives inside of me and I don’t even remember what I used. I see our lives as one batch of soup after the other. Sometimes we must try what we don’t like just to figure out what we do.
Sometimes others can see your soupy life better then you can when we’re standing in it. That is why I love my friends and family who love me enough to say to me. “You’re in the soup!”
Maybe if you step back you will see it also. Who knows, you just might be in the best soup of your life right now!!! So savor and enjoy it with all your senses! Remember what ingredients you used and how you balanced those flavors with your attention to detail. (What amount of each Mind/Body/Spirit/Family/Love/Work feels and tastes just right to you?)
Try and remember the amount of attention it took to craft it just right and remember: “You are the chef of your life.” Remind yourself of this whenever you feel unbalanced or overwhelmed, that you can go back to the basics and make your favorite, soul comforting, simple soup. You have the power. You are the Chef of your soupy life.
I love you. You got this.
With love,
Emy Minzel ~ Adventure Sister
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Stacy Crep ~ Adventure Sister
Emy Minzel 