You must have heard this adage many times:

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

It is a jarringly cliched adage, one I personally find annoyingly pompous. Yeah right, I say to myself!

It is very easy to preach it when everything is going well. When life actually hands you a lemon, you are too busy giving vent to your sense of entitlement to think of making lemonade. You are too busy demanding answers of a reclusive divinity to think of converting a liability into an asset. You are too busy proclaiming to the world how you were done the dirty on by a malevolent universe out to get you.

And if life gives you a truckload of lemons- you curl up and play dead. Like THAT helps!

Here is Maysoon Zayid, to tell you how she won through her limitation and did not let it define her. Here is a practical demo on how to make lemonade of the lemons life gives you.

 

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buRLc2eWGPQ?rel=0%5D

 

You have probably got something very different out of the video than I have. Our responses to stimuli are determined by where we are in our life journey. What I got is summed up by this quote:

Part of the problem with the word ‘disabilities’ is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can’t feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.

~ Fred Rogers

The next time you are tempted to wallow in self- pity, as all of us do at times, think of people who realized their dreams, reached their goals, lived to the hilt. They didn’t do it because they had no challenges and were given everything on a platter. They did it despite their challenges. They rose above their limitations. And that takes strength, not only of body, but of character- mind and spirit.

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

~Johann von Goethe

Don’t let your weakness become your excuse for living a half life. You were meant to do what you want to do with all your heart. You were also meant to find a way to by- pass your challenges to get to your North Star. Your goal is not just to reach your goal; your goal is also to find a way out of the morass! That’s where courage is given wings!

You can CAN! Yes, you CAN!

Picture Mine
Picture Mine