“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). To paraphrase a popular saying, variety is the seasoning of life. A lot of us have this idea in our head that a perfect life, even just a good life, is composed of a certain set of ingredients - success, happiness, comfort, security. These are absolutely essential to our lives. But equally essential are pain, sorrow, loneliness, and anxiety. Our lives don't have to be just one thing. Even if we are in a season of mourning, that does not mean that little sparks of joy that penetrate the heaviness of our grief somehow cheapen our love or displace our grief. And if we are in a season of brilliant success, small moments of doubt or dissatisfaction do not invalidate all of the amazing progress we are making. It is true that we can often be the architects of our own pain and misery by making stupid and foolish choices. But it is also true that hard days will come to us even when we are doing everything right. If we have too much of the same thing, we will soon grow overly satiated and become blind to the wonders of that thing. By allowing all of the different seasonings to blend harmoniously together - the sweetness of love and joy, the sourness of dissatisfaction, the saltiness of frustration, the richness of success, the bitterness of pain and sorrow - we can make of our lives this amazing feast that is always bursting with new and different flavors. A little bitterness or saltiness does not have to ruin our whole experience but can enhance it instead. We are not failing at life if we sometimes have bad days, and even if we are wading through chronic illnesses or major depressions, it is not a betrayal to our diagnoses if sometimes a little happiness sneaks past our defenses. If we stubbornly insist that we only ever have good times in our life, then we are like the kid who always tries to order chicken nuggets and ketchup no matter what the restaurant or what amazing and new dishes are available. We can try to cut ourselves off from certain seasonings of life, but we will be depriving ourselves of so many wonderful flavor combinations and we will eventually grow bored and sick of the things we once loved. I hope that we all allow ourselves to savor every season of life and that we look forward to all of the combinations and recipes that we have not yet tried.
