Lessons From Burnt Soup – Overcoming Regret and Embracing Change

I have loved being able to write. It’s helped me all year to dig into myself and find out what lurks inside that I need to deal with. There is some trapped emotion and feelings behind my sadness, anger, and even joy. Not so much trapped but exploding within and waiting to be heard. I haven’t been able to write much lately, there have been some things looming that I have not been ready to dig into. I am trying to be gentle with myself as I try to chip the ice away on some frozen, too cold to handle…. feelings. Also, there are just way too many stories I could tell in the last couple of months, I don’t even know where to really begin so I keep skirting around things. I think that is actually why I can’t write, because I want to be truly authentic and sometimes due to others involved, I can’t be.

It’s been one hell of a year. Extreme lows and highs. More self-discovery than I have ever imagined possible. Yet here I sit after I have written a thousand pages, and I still have more to learn. I still have more to grow through. I’m not there yet. Will I ever be? Do we keep learning about ourselves and others until we are eighty, ninety, or to whenever we leave this earth? Or is that only the beginning of our learning? Is this one life we live the one that figures out everything or is this just one life in a chain that helps us to learn new things as our soul keeps reaching for new heights?

Do you have any deep regrets? Like buried so deep that they bubble up to the surface like hot lava and just when they are about to explode you pour a bucket of cold water on it and it retreats again. You have done the cycle hundreds of times, the lava stays dormant for a while, then like a hot burner it starts to turn red and starts to burn. You can feel the burn inside like you have just touched the hot stove burner with your fingers as you ran a dishrag over a burner that you forgot was still hot. You pull your hand away quickly. Now you can either come back and clean the burner when it cools down again and everything can stay calm and just like it is or this time you decide to pour soap on the burner to watch it bubble and then with anticipation you grab an oven mitt, and rage away on the hot burner, thinking that maybe, maybe this time, it will all come clean because the heat will melt away the stain.  So you try, you are in the heat of the battle (no pun intended) and you scrub at the hot burner, sometimes you can feel it a bit through your oven mitt, but you don’t care because you are just going to keep poking the bear.  You have decided this time you are going for it; you are going to take the heat and clean up the mess. This time you decided enough is enough, I’ll never get that burner clean if I just keep leaving it cool to keep hardening, again, and again, and again. This time even after it cools you take this cleaner and that cleaner, you grab a spatula to scratch away, you even ground down your nails getting every little last piece of the burn stain. This time you will start with a clean slate, this time you’re going to put in the work, to keep the burner clean. This time you are going to clean your Tupperware drawer, and it is going to stay like that. This time you are going to clean the sink every time you use it. This time you will put the lid on the toothpaste. This time, it’s going to stick, this time the stove won’t have an explosion of hot bubbly soup that stains all around the burner.

Here is the hard truth, we are creatures of habit. We fall back into our old patterns. We may try to leave the soup cooking at medium but when we think it just isn’t going anywhere, then what’s a few more degrees to get at it faster. At this point, you know you have to watch the soup extra careful, but you don’t because you are a creature of habit. You check a text, run to put in the next load of laundry, you pour a little one a glass of milk and help them with the batteries they need for their toy, there is always, always something that takes you away from watching the pot of soup.  Then there you are again, like the hundreds of times before, running at lightning speed to pull the pot off the stove and minimize the amount of soup that has boiled over and see if you can save the soup or is it too burned on the bottom to be saved?

What in this story needs to change? Where do you always go wrong? The deep-seated impatience of turning the burner so high is what changes the story. We are our own enemy within. How many times do you need to burn the soup in order to change? Well for me, I need to accept that a piping hot burner means burnt soup, once the train has already left the station, we can’t slow it down or bring it back, no matter how hard we try. Identifying when you are about to turn up the heat is the point that is the easiest to come back from. If you miss that part, you have burnt soup that no one wants to eat and you have the regret of having done something you know produces terrible consequences, every single time.

We must recognize when things are good, let them be good. When the soup is cooking nicely, let it be, it might take longer to heat up than you want but you will get that result that you actually want in the end.

So here is to breaking old habits this year and recognizing when you are about to turn up the heat and doing something about it then instead of waiting to burn your hand on a burner and cause yourself possibly some irreversible damage with scars to prove it.

Here is to a clean slate and hoping that your fingers have been burnt enough times that you can stop turning up the heat on the soup. Or maybe play it safe for a while and just have sandwiches. Start over with something new, not just a clean slate but a new idea of how not to keep burning the dam soup. That is what I’m going to do, and I feel better already thinking about it.

Chat again soon, 

Michelle