If Life gives you lemons...(the Philosopher's Stoned)

If life gives you lemons make lemonade - if you want to. Otherwise advertise on the internet to swap them for something you actually want. Life doesn’t pander to the individual’s whims and fancies. It deals with what’s there. If you’re down a coal mine it will give you coal. If you’re in a lemon grove, then it gives you lemons. It’s up to you how you use whatever bounty you are blessed with. If it gives you wads of money but the idea of being rich bores you, spend it on piano lessons if that’s what you want and give yourself the chance of becoming a world-famous pianist. If you have an ambition, follow it. There’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t let life dictate the ambition. It’s your choice. If life gives you an education that makes you suited for an anonymous job in sales or Human Resources, your ambition isn’t limited to promotion within those fields. Save your pay and set yourself up with what you want to do. Or use the money to survive while you struggle to get that rock band together. But don’t let life dictate. Just because industry has dictated what type of students our education system must create, that doesn’t mean you have to follow what industry wants. Frankly, industry will get what it’s bloody well given, and if that happens to be lemons then it’s up to industry to work out how to take advantage of that. 

Remember, you might not want them, but lemons aren’t valueless.  Someone somewhere wants the yellow fiends, and they’ll give you money for them. And you could then exchange that money for anything you want. I’m not saying lemons are bad things. I’m saying, if you found yourself being gifted them, it’s not the end of the transaction. Life’s events are not dictatorial (usually), they’re simple a key to opening other doors.

So, if life gives you lemons, don’t try and compete with Barr’s or Schweppes, and don’t try and sell them to a lemon farmer. Whatever stock life gives you, trade it for something you need or desire and pay no attention to the inane platitudes dreamt up by people with nothing better to do.

Right then, who’s for fish and chips.