Life is Really Five Bowls of Cherries
Forrest Gump was right about one thing; life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get throughout the course of the day. But the downfall of such a summary is that it doesn't apply to life as a whole, only a day to day basis account.
Sometime in the seventies, a song was written, that the famous Bob Fosse later choreographed. However, this summary was also flawed. "Life is a Bowl of Cherries," came very, so very close to finally getting a summary of life correct, when it came to comparing it to food.
The true way to describe life is to take five bowls out of the kitchen cupboard and one hundred cherries out of the refrigerator; set these on a conveniently large counter or table. The next step is to separate or, rather dissect, the cherries into the five bowls.
In the first bowl, place the plucked stems. The stems are "the values of life." Morals are what keep our chins held high, our spines straight with honour, and our conscience whispering, "You're ok." Stems are what keep the cherries connected to their mother tree, their life support. To humans, that is our ethics. They keep us going everyday of lives. And we have a fair amount of it. It's not completely expendable, but there's enough to get us through life comfortably.
Secondly, skin the cherries and put the skins in another bowl. The skin represents the time we waste worrying about the little things. The skin of cherries is very thin and, when eating them, can barely taste the outer flesh. One thing that I remember my grandfather told me was, "Number One: don't sweat the small stuff. Number Two: everything is small stuff."
The next two steps coincide with eachother. In one bowl, squeeze out whatever juice is left the cherry. There really isn't that much, but that's also the point. The juice represents the sweet, savor-worthy times in life when everything is just going your way. These would include (well, most likely) a first kiss, receiving a prestigious award, a death in the family (this would only count if the relative really liked you and was exceedingly rich), or your wedding (or being welcomed into a nunnery of monkshood).
The second part after all the juice is squeezed is the conundrum of what to do with the "leftovers." The fourth bowls is for the meat, scraped off the pit. When done, simply throw the pits into the fifth bowl. The meat is the sustenance in life, or just your routine and the other things that make life worth while. The pits are there to represent the sorrow and the hardships that come with living in this type of society. You'll notice that, altogether, the pits are equal to the meat and juice combined.
There's a good reason why people say life is a job. With the bad and good, it takes on the aura of a career. How does this relate to cherries? I don't know about you, but skinning and juicing cherries is hard work, a vocation of a unique sort.