Though Sally Field ruminates that life is like a box of chocolates, concluding ‘you never know what you’re gonna get’, I am the kind of person that simply references the handy guide that is provided by the manufacturer in order to avoid the hazelnut ones; therefore getting the chocolates that I want and avoiding the ones I dislike.
Comparing the randomness of life to chocolates is a cute and somewhat comfortingly straightforward way to box-wrap our confusion about why things in life just happen into just one neat little space, to be accessed as and when we need to explain away everyday chaos.
However, this is a sandwich blog…so you know what’s coming next 😊
Perhaps life is like a sandwich.
Slices of bread provide the order, the boundaries; these are the daily tasks to be completed, the nine to five to be endured, the weekly shop to be paid for, the school trips to be funded, the holidays that must be planned. These slices create the structure, indeed the borders to our worlds that barrier the unexplained, the unexpected, the unwelcome.
Life however is in the filling. It can be as meaty, as juicy, as cold, as warm, as tepid, as sparse or as dry as we want. This is the fun bit – the bit where living happens, where we become explorers and where flavour meets passion on the road to fulfilment. If we are lucky enough to be able to create our ideal filling, we have an enviable choice that billions around the globe don’t and may never have. Rather than merely existing, having the ability to choose your sandwich filling is equatable to living.
Now…here’s the tricky bit. Imagine someone at the herb factory has messed up and mixed your chives with coriander…and you HATE coriander. Unnoticed, however, it gets mixed into your sandwich filling. This is called randomness…or for some people…chaos. As you take that first bite, you know something is wrong and the first thought is – ‘oh dear’.
The next step here is crucial – do you pause, reflect and think ‘what next’, or do you throw the sandwich on the ground and stomp all over it, blaming the gods for a terrible occurrence? (OK – a bit dramatic…but hopefully you get my drift). In this, we have the actual life scenario. No matter how much we try to control our ingredients to extract the most flavour out of the filling, random things will happen – whether caused by people or nature, and we have no control over this.
Does this realisation ultimately mean that we should relinquish control over our recipe creation in life? Absolutely not, however when the recipe goes wrong, there’s usually not a thing we can do about it but to accept, deal and push forward day by day – hopefully with the support of good people we meet along the way. The only certainty we have is that randomness (chaos) and the unexplained will happen everyday and we are powerless to prevent its occurrence. It is therefore our response that really makes the difference as to how the sandwich filling recipe develops from here.
Anyway – watching a movie with your favourite sandwich and a glass of wine is a great way to unwind and take care of yourself – and at the end of the day, taking care of number one is the most important thing you can do for both yourself and others.
I do agree – life is like a box of chocolates, principally because nobody ever said that life is like a sandwich and if they did, they probably received some strange looks. However, they dealt with it and moved swiftly on.
Between The BreadSheets 