May 5, 2010

The Best or Not The Best

Here's another analogy that came to my mind before bed last night:
You're in a grocery store, in a juice aisle. You look around, trying to pick the one that you want the most. Should it be pineapple or orange? Or maybe you should buy plum or apricot juice instead? You stand there for a while, not certain which one to take. Finally, you get a mango juice that's exotic and sweet.
At home you try it and you like it. But on the back of your mind you think, "What if the plum juice were better? Or maybe pineapple? Pineapple could have been even sweeter..." While drinking the mango juice, you can't help but contemplate the "what-ifs" and miss the acute taste of mango and the true sweetness of it.
It seems like we can't fully enjoy what we have chosen because the thought of possibly having something better pains us deep inside. Until we realize that there's no such thing as "the best," we will never learn how to enjoy life. Once we see that what we have is good for now, and that Now is all we have, it turns out that it is all well, in a larger scale.

4 comments:

  1. Agreed. Funny thing, I was thinking about this very topic yesterday. Though, I was thinking about it in a different way. I know that people from every culture and every walk of life try to find the "best", but in America, we're socialized to always better or the best. Americans are always, even in times of hardship, given a plethora of choices.

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  2. Very true. I don't think that there's anything wrong with having many choices. The problem arises when the chase for choices creates paranoia, even an addiction, that eventually destroys a person and their life. Happiness and joy become unreachable.

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  3. Sometimes I get too caught up on finding out what the "best" decision is that I don't realize that all of my choices are good. Other times, it's because the choices are all great that making a decision is hard. Try not to get too caught up in regret over things like that. A lot of times we can only later realize that another option was better because of what happened after. Most of the bad choices I have made couldn't be avoided by any amount of thoughtfulness because there just wasn't enough information to properly compare everything. There is never enough information, sometimes you just have to take risks and try the pomegranate juice.

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  4. I think what we really need to focus on and then let go of is the fact that we make the best from what we have at the moment. Nothing else matters.

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