When life gives you lemons...

We've all heard that old saying: If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. But what exactly does that mean? Is it just that we should make the best of a bad situation?

I went in today for my grad school interview, and part of my task was to read two paragraphs and write an essay in response. The two paragraphs listed a series of possible responses to situations where things don't quite go as expected.

The first response was just to assume it was just some sort of odd occurrence, and forget about it. The second was to take some time to reflect on the situation -- either at the time or later -- and the third was to simultaneously reflect and act; to notice what was happening and make some sort of smooth and appropriate shift.

That last choice reminded me, for some reason, of failed attempts to converse with cute boys when I was younger, and my usual inability to respond smoothly and appropriately to any conversational openings that arose: mostly I just froze and stammered. And I think, somehow, that my early failures in that arena must be what led me to assume -- for the sake of my essay, at least -- that the last choice is the most desirable choice, which then of course could be interpreted to imply that the other two are weak or lazy responses.

But of course each response can be valid in certain situations. For example, no tried and true technique for ANYthing is ALways going to work, so there are probably lots of instances where a minor failure can be ignored and you can just move on, and, in fact, you can create problems unnecessarily by stewing over a perfectly normal glitch. And, nice as it would be to be totally responsive in a given situation, if you don't do some reflecting on it afterwards, take time to figure out exactly what might have gone wrong, you increase your chances of having it happen again -- and again having to respond on the fly.

So in addition to knowing how to reflect, how to respond quickly, and knowing how to just "stuff things under the rug," we need to know WHEN each of these options might be appropriate. Or, to stick with our initial metaphor, maybe you don't always need to make lemonade. Sometimes it might be more appropriate to toss out those lemons and go buy the oranges you wanted in the first place. And sometimes it might be good to sit and stew a bit about what you might have done differently in the first place to avoid being handed lemons at all. Maybe making lemonade is a good thing. But each is a reasonable option, in its own time.

And it's all good.