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Life Well Lived
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The All Around Life
Life Well Lived
Small Plates vs Large Plates
What if your life has a limited capacity to hold all of the things that life tries to give you? Some of these things are good and some of them bad, but all of them fill up your limited capacity in some way, like a plate. Sometimes life can overwhelm you and things fall off of the edges.
For some reason a lot of my analogies relate to food. In order to keep with that tradition, imagine if you will that you are at a company picnic and everyone has brought a dish to share. BBQ ribs, hot dogs, hamburgers, coleslaw, potato salad, brisket, brownies, chips, banana pudding, and so on. All this delicious food, and your mouth starts to water just thinking of it, and yet almost immediately you are confronted with a problem. No matter the size, it always seems as if your plate is too small. You want to be able to hold all that you want on your plate, and yet as you pile this food on, at some point you have to stop because now your plate is full.
I don’t have all I want, but my plate is full. In many ways this sounds just like my life. I have so much that I want out of life, but as I start piling on, my plate gets full and I eventually have to say no to more things in my life.
Now, what if I told you that it is possible get a bigger plate?
Start with the big things first.
It’s moving day. You have decided it is time to pursue that new career, expand your family, or even move cross country to change the scenery. The moving truck shows up in your driveway and hopefully your friends or your moving crew has showed up as well.
You, as the self appointed Chief of Truck Packing, yell out to your crew, “Let’s start with all the small things first!” Everyone starts grabbing pillows, knickknacks, pictures, plants, toys, garden tools, lamps, etc. The truck seems to be coming along nicely until you get to the furniture. The truck is over half full and now you don’t have room to fit the couch, so you toss it to the side. You got your child’s bed in on the side, but the mattress is not going to make it. At the end of the day, you drive away with all the small stuff, but left the big things behind.
Instinctively you know that there is a major problem with this story! You always pack the big stuff first, and fill in the gaps with the smaller things. In fact, most of the time you are able to get all of the big things AND all of the small things.
So it is with your life. If you put all of the small things on your plates, you can miss out on the bigger things of life. Get the big things on, and you’ll still have room for the smaller things.
What are some of the big things in your life that should get on your plate first?
Leave Some Room
OK, so I guess most of what I am going to tell you won’t really enlarge your plate, just maximize it. I promise I’ll get to the growing your plate larger conversations soon! Anyway…..So you have your plate. You’ve got all the big things on it and you’ve added all the small things. Now, something new come along. Your kid has a school play, the car just broke down, your friend invited you on a cool weekend getaway, your boss has given you a new project, you have the opportunity to serve at church, you just found out a parent is sick, etc. The point is, you’ve either been given something unexpected that HAS to go on your plate, or you’ve been given the opportunity to add something you really want to your plate.
Honestly, if you are in this position, with a plate this full, it’s probably frequent that something falls off the plate. Oops, I forgot to pay that bill or oops, I thought our lunch meeting was next week. So now you have to move some of the small things off that you hadn’t planned on removing, and you have to fit this new thing on. It’s inconvenient, it changes your schedule, it changes your rhythm of life, and it changes your budget. Do you know what’s better? When you start to fill your plate with the big things and then the small things, leave some room.
Remember the company picnic? Let’s go through the food line again. You skip the salad, because this ain’t Ruby Tuesday, and you make sure you get the big stuff like the ribs and burgers, then you fill it with small stuff, like the corn, and the baked beans. You decide to leave some room on your plate, because you don’t want to have to clean those baked beans up off the floor. But as you are walking, you forgot that the dessert table was on the other side of the room. That banana pudding is looking pretty good, and thankfully you left some room for the unexpected, and now it has paid off big time!
Leaving some room in your life allows you the flexibility to adapt to life. Life is definitely full of surprises, and if you don’t leave some room for when life happens, or when life hits the fan, then things will begin to fall off.
What things do you need to leave off of your plate to free you to have the flexibility and creativity to handle the unexpected?
Leave some room so you have space to be creative in reorganizing the contents on your plate. You can’t reorganize the moving truck once it’s fully packed!
Do Something Different
Alright, we are still a little bit on maximizing, but we are beginning to look at growing the size of your plate. You’ve probably heard that famous quote about the definition of insanity that was supposedly uttered by Einstein. Something about doing the same thing, but expecting a different result. It’s cliche. But it’s also true. I’ll share a couple of examples where I did something different.
At this point my food analogies are cliche, but again, they are also true, so I’m going to just go with it. When I was younger up until I was in my mid to late twenties, I hated vegetables, or so I thought. My plate was very small. I was limited in the types of food I would eat. Basically nothing healthy (sorry about skipping the salad earlier….I’ve learned my lesson!) and definitely nothing ethnic. I was really missing out and I knew it.
So I did something different. Instead of buying ready made meals, or only buying the things I liked. I started cooking my own meals with fresh ingredients, and I cooked with ingredients that I typically would not eat. My plate started getting bigger. I decided that if I cook something then I will learn about the ingredients and why the flavors go together with other flavors. I became a student of food and although I stumbled a ton along the way, I not only learned to cook, but I learned to love vegetables.
Apparently I’m just recycling old stories here because I go into more detail in one of my earlier blogs. Sorry about that, but what I am trying to say is that I did something different and I was able to grow the size of my plate. I became a better host to guests (no more canned green beans!), I became more interested in various cultures and their cuisines, I learned how to handle myself in the kitchen, I learned kitchen safety, I learned to grocery shop, I learned to keep a budget, I learned how the nutrients in spinach are best absorbed into our bodies if it is paired with parmesan cheese.
So I did something different and my plate grew.
My other story about doing something different involves camping. I used to hate camping, and at the time, life was not quite going how I had planned. So I decided, well, my life so far has not involved camping at all, maybe I’ll do something different and add camping to my life.
So, again, I stumbled through it. I didn’t have the right camping gear. I didn’t quite know what I was doing when I went camping. The first time I went out, I went for what was supposed to be a nice 5 mile hike that turned into 12 miles….after dark. So that was a massive failure, but I stuck with it, and now my plate is bigger.
My plate actually grew in ways I didn’t expect too. Sure, the normal things, like I learned how to plan a camping meal (it’s always food with me, isn’t it), I learned how to put up a tent in the dark, I learned what clothes to pack, and I learned how to build an awesome fire. But I also learned how to be alone with myself, and still be ok. I learned to connect with my Mom’s husband, Jay, over fishing. I learned how to slow down and enjoy simpler things.
To grow your plate, do something different, because doing the same thing will only keep your plate the same size.
Don’t Avoid Pain or Discomfort
If you really want to grow your plate size, here is where the hard work is done. Everything worth anything is going to be harder than you thought, take longer than you thought, and cost more than you thought. But if you want the capacity to handle, take on, and deal with more things in life, then you will have to lean into pain and discomfort to grow your plate size.
Not so fast though, because not all pain is the same. If you are training for a 10k and that last mile hurts, your feet are blistered, your legs are cramping, your lungs are burning, then leaning in and enduring the pain and the discomfort is incredibly helpful in expanding your capacity to run longer distances.
If you have a dish in the oven that’s just finished cooking, and you try to take it out with your bare hands, it’s going to hurt. But you don’t get better at taking hot dishes out of the oven with your bare hands if you keep doing it. It’s always going to hurt, and it’s always unhelpful. Some relationships are like this. Avoid this kind of pain.
The good pain, though, is likely the only path to getting a larger plate. You have to endure this pain and this discomfort to get to your goals. If you quit, then your plate stays the same as it’s ever been. Check out this kid learning to jump off a diving board. His legs shake violently with fear, and although we don’t see it in the first clip, this kid leans into his pain, and jumps. He is clearly not comfortable with jumping off the diving board, but he knows the goal in front of him of being able to dive from the board and swim on his own. His family sees it too and encourages him along the way. This kid gets it, and in the end, he has grown his plate size. He is able to handle more in his life because he didn’t run from the pain or discomfort.
Pain stretches you and tests you. Your tolerance for pain with determine how far grow and how big your plate can be. This pain is the pain of a moment that feels like it will never pass, but it does. Run from the pain by turning to drugs, pornography, food, self harm, alcohol, shopping, or any other addiction, and you stunt your growth. And then there is the enduring pain as well, that actually does last for a long time. The heartache of a lost one, the pain of parenthood and it’s constant daily struggles, the pain of schooling and working towards that masters degree.
How many times have you put the hard work in, but at the very moment you were to receive your reward, you gave up?
Capacity For Life
Really this is just a conversation about how you can get more of life into your own life. This is what it means to live your life to the full. Don’t live a small life limited by quitting, disorganization, being overly busy, or content doing the same thing over and over. I encourage you to live your life to it’s fullest by starting with the big things first, leaving some room, doing something different, and not running from pain.