Sweet And Sour

Isn’t that the story of our lives? We can’t ever count on everything being smooth sailing. Our experiences inform us that that the unknowable futures will deliver a mixture of sweet and sour. Count yourself very lucky if the balance is tending in your favor.

It matters so much where fate has dropped your body. You could have been born in the Sudan, somewhere in Darfur. I have flown over that desert region, hugging myself and hoping the single-engine plane I was in would land us at our destination. I was there on a Canadian aid mission arranging to deliver food to starving people. I remember being in the Kivu, a northern plateau in the Congo, trying to increase fruits and vegetable shipments to the capital Kinshasa, where only minute supplies came in by passenger plane. I remember working, as well, in Mauretania, in Senegal, in Burkina Faso, in Honduras, in Jamaica, and other places, too many to mention, to advance efforts to feed people.

Maybe there were some people in those places who believed their life was sweet. For the mass of people, life seemed more likely to be sour in my view. Attitude is important, but it is really important where bodies happens to be if life is to be more sweet than sour for large portions of the population.

I know I am addressing audience who can be counted among the more fortunate in the world. I know that when I speak of the joys of my favorite music, my favorite meals, the pleasure of walking in a peaceful garden, in a peaceful park, and how sweet these things are in my life, I can strike a responsive chord. When I speak of family, of children, of a touch from a friend or a lover, I am speaking of the universal, things which can yield sweetness in our lives anywhere on the planet.

When we talk of hunger, war and desolation, we are speaking more of the unfortunate places like some of those I have visited and worked in. Most of us reading this have been spared the worst of this. We have all had those times in our working lives when the future looked black and we wondered which way to turn. We, of more advanced age, have all had those awful times of irretrievable loss in our lives when a happy future appeared inconceivable. Talk about sour! Every person alive will face challenges negotiating the paths we follow.

Our everyday lives are a combination of sweet and sour. Something untoward appears, the opposite of what we have been hoping for, which can send us into a temporary tailspin. Some good fortune explodes onto our landscape and we are immersed in joy and laughter. Disease and death are on the agenda, as are the arrival of the rewards of hard work and persistence. “Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”* strike us from any direction as we proceed with our lives. We have to learn to take what comes with equanimity, reacting as we must to cope, if we are to survive with a brain intact.

Many of us have much to be thankful for. Most of us are  cognizant of the gratitude we owe for the good luck we have had to be born where we were, where life is more ordered, where parents had the resources to exercise care for their children, where we have survived to play the parts we have in life’s panorama. We must accept the sour we have had to taste as fate’s price for the sweetness that has been our lot in life.

*From the soliloquy by Hamlet in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare.