The Girl Behind the Cook Books.

It takes multiple experiences of failures, stumbling over one’s own feet, harsh face plants, terrifying moments, feeling lost, losing people in your life to  understand the idea of appreciation for the joyous times, your stronger moments, love, happiness… to realize you took it all for granted when you did get it, have it, possess it, were loved… the list goes on. Why does it take these kinds of incidents for us to finally see the bigger picture? Or sometimes, unfortunately, for us to continue on being blinded and not learn from our mistakes? Why is that? Is it really our natural instincts that push us forward in life with burdens of regret or the continuation of stupidity because we weren’t brave enough to accept it the first time? It seems to me it is this inevitable, terrible cycle that makes little sense because we simply say, “I didn’t get it the first time, okay?” and then it’s back to not getting it again and again. If in everything we did, we could use one statement to brush it off, clean it up, explain it, we wouldn’t have much of a life. Life would simply just lose its meaning in general – you could pretty much live vicariously through reading books and movies.

I don’t want to live knowing that I keep messing up and that I still haven’t grasped some sort of growth. Strangely enough cooking has shown me that. This experience and progression of each meal, each new dessert, recording my thoughts, expressing my successes and failures to some unknown audience has taught me something bigger than just not substituting one item for the other. It’s taught me that we’re given chances, opportunities, perfect “times,” to do things, and sometimes, we mess up, we miss these gifts, and either we can lose it all together and stay on the ground feeling sorry for ourselves, or we can pick ourselves up and realize there’s a lesson to be learned and move on. Life is like a cooking – you’re given suggested directions, ingredients (i.e. the norm, right versus wrong, etc.) and what you do with these is what changes the outcome. Sometimes you get it on the first try, sometimes it takes ten times – either way, you have to learn to appreciate it when you get it, when you don’t, when you fall, and when you get up again.

Appreciation.

For life, for love, for failure, for success, for everything.

Life’s lessons are all cliches – but they’re only cliches cause everyone knows them but no one really gets them.