Posted on 21 Apr, 2011 -
Life is a Pizza
Why life is like a pizza
Why children need to be horrid to their parents sometimes
And why most things aren’t really about you anyway
Dear Reader,
This week, Life is a Bag of Revels brings you: Life is a Pizza!
In fact, life is so vast and wondrous and multifaceted and complicated that I could probably write ‘Life is’ emails…
(I’m already thinking ‘Treat Your Life as You Would a Garden… Life is Like My Grandma’s Sewing Basket and Life is Like a Toad in the Hole)
... for the rest of the year.
But you’d quickly get bored of that. In fact, I’m bored of it already.
But then ‘boredom’ itself is such an interesting human psychology topic that perhaps I should talk about that instead…
Stop! Think I must have put three spoonfuls of coffee in the pot this morning. Or perhaps I’ve just got the wind under my tail. The clouds are racing across the sky in the distance and my mind is in a very energetic, open, march-towards-the-summer mood. Very different from how it was in January and February when it was more like a Toad in the Hole in fact…
But now I really am digressing. So back to… the PIZZA.
Life, jobs, spouses, kids… They’re all like pizzas too!
The Life is a Pizza idea is another one of the ‘rules’ I rather like from Richard Templar’s ‘The Rules of Life’ book.
When his kids were young, says Richard, they would refuse to eat a pizza if it had something on it they didn’t like and would burst into tears and start crying about the mushrooms or ham if they’d decided not to like those that day. For Richard himself there are also things he doesn’t like on pizza such as olives or sundried tomatoes but he loves pizza so he just picks those off.
I think by now you probably know where this is going… “Yes, life is a pizza, with everything on it.”
Nobody ever likes everything about their jobs, or their spouse, or their children, for example. But there are (hopefully) so many things we do like about them that we just put up with the not-so-good bits.
As Richard Templar says, even the very “best things in life come with chewy dried tomatoes”.
There are even parents he knows who have moved their kids from school to school because there’s always something they didn’t like about the last one and they want to find the perfect one. But they never will find the perfect one.
And we never will have a job that doesn’t really upset us on certain days or in certain ways… There never is a day that is perfect in every way… Even a Michelin star meal cooked by a Master Chef would have something you didn’t like about it.
Because life is just like that. And reminding yourself that from time to time can make it easier to swallow.
Why children need to be horrid to their parents sometimes
Another rule I like from the book is no. 83 which is: Your children need to fall out with you to leave home.
My children are not teenagers yet and that is mostly what this is about. I do already feel in my nearly 9 year-old, though, that she often has to see me as wrong so that she can learn to try and be right about things herself. So this rule helped me to deal with that. And I’m sure it will help me deal with the pain of having a teenager who barely talks to me and thinks I’m embarrassing.
”If they loved you too much they couldn’t leave. You’ve nurtured them, wiped their bums, dressed them, fed them, doled out money for all their lives. And they don’t want to feel grateful. They want to leave, to drink too much, have sex and use grownup swear words. They don’t want to be your darling little angel any more. They want to be spiky and daring and rude and adult.”
So let them go off and do there turning into an adult thing. Then you can have them back in a few years as your grownup son or daughter instead of your little child…
Next time somebody’s rude or angry, don’t take it too personally
Just as it is easier to deal with a teenager being rude to you if you understand why they are acting towards you as they are, so with the rest of the people in our lives.
Next time somebody is rude to you or angry, instead of feeling upset that they’re not being nice to you, ask yourself instead what might have caused them to act like that.
There’s a very good chance that it will not be because of you. There may be something that they’re going through at the moment. An argument they’ve just had with somebody else…
...Maybe they are finding the situation hard for some reason. Or perhaps they’ve just become that kind of person over the years because of the life that they’ve had or the way they’ve dealt with or responded to it.
And what if it is - or seems to be - about you? Then it’s better that you understand where they’re coming from too.
Rather than feel (just) defensive and upset and affronted, try to see it from where they’re standing - or from inside their mind too.
What are they feeling or going through that is making them act in this way towards you? How could something you have done upset them in some way - even if you didn’t intend for this to happen?
An experiment in handling the negative moods of others
When somebody near you is rude or angry or grumpy - it is very easy to be rude or angry or grumpy back.
I know I can certainly be guilty of this myself at times so the experiment I have set for myself is this:
Instead of mimicking or reflecting back the negative mood of somebody I’m talking to - whether it’s a stranger, an acquaintance or somebody I love - I’m going to try to remember to catch the mood instead, hold it in my hands to examine it for a second then drop it on the floor and throw a different, much more positive one back.
Who knows, they might even catch it…
