Making Lemonade Out of Lessons

Each item on our to do lists leads us toward our purpose and best self.  If such tasks remain incomplete, we never achieve our greatest potential or impact the lives of others with our unique gifts.  Every journey of greatness or faith-walk begins with our commitment to a task.

“Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step,” encouraged Martin Luther King, Jr.  Such were the wise words echoed to me through a friend when I had to make one of the biggest decisions of my life to close one chapter and start a whole new book.  Unfamiliar and shaky, that first step is daunting but required for any new journey. 

Like most miracles, what appears untenable and bleak transforms into better tomorrows.  My own survival taught me of the direct correlation between taking chances and making change.  It reminds me of the importance to make sweet lemonade with every seemingly sour opportunity.  Not only because we should but because we can.  

Now I strive to take more first steps, to say ‘yes’ to new opportunities, to the unfamiliar and what previously I might have considered impossible.  Everything is possible when we seek and say yes to the new and follow through. Conversely, I also learned to say ‘no’ to talking and never doing, backward motion, comparing my art or its impact to that of others and staying stuck on self-flagellation.  How curious that mistakes so often obscure blessings.

As proof, I offer: Ecce Mono a/k/a Behold the Monkey.  Ecce Mono is the shockingly inaccurate restoration of an iconographic rendition of Jesus Christ – generally referred to as Ecce Homo or Behold the Man.  The simian work was an attempted restoration of a valued fresco in Zaragoza, Spain by “artist” Cecilia Giménez.  With somewhat misguided earnestness, 80-year-old Giménez took on the project now widely assessed to have exceeded her skill levels and, by all accounts, ruined a beautiful work of art. 

While the efforts of Giménez may preclude future painting commissions, on a more positive note she is now the patron saint of marginal painters. Giménez’s mistakes spawned a slew of parodies and ironic followers, reproductions and merchandise opps from which she stands to monetarily benefit.  Each reminds of the potential to dulcify lemons even when ruin looms.

Maybe it’s an issue of perspective or just confidence.  Still, when we change our mindset, the situation  and our response to it similarly shift.  All that is required is the courage to take that first step and discover the fabulous places to which it leads.