A while back, I had a peanut butter dilemma. I couldn’t deal with it. I tried and tried to preserve the purity of the top of my peanut butter, and it sunk farther away each time I scooped some out. I didn’t know how to deal with it. So I tried again. And again and each time the same thing happened.
Then I thought to myself, maybe I wasn’t thinking big enough. Maybe I needed a bigger jar. Maybe my peanut butter dilemma would be solved if there was more peanut butter to deal with. Maybe somehow having more peanut butter would create a better base to hold up the perfect top. Maybe a larger jar would give me more room to manage the peanut butter and my scooping and scraping could be more controlled. Maybe.
Maybe is only good until you know. I had to know. That’s why I bought a 6-pound tub of peanut butter. Peter Pan peanut butter, because it’s the best and it’s what I used last time I had my peanut butter dilemma. The 6-pound tub would be large enough for my large hands to get in and dissect the peanut butter. The 6-pound tub would be large enough to contain enough peanut butter to support the rest, for longer at least. I’ve had a 6-pounder before, in college, and I ate my way through it in a matter of months. Those were the days. But this time, I was a man on a mission. I needed the 6 pounds of peanut butter to solve my dilemma.
It didn’t work.
It slid.
I wasn’t able to scrape and scoop in a way to keep everything in my control. I could only control the appearance on the top. What happened beneath the surface was out of my control.
Here’s my proof:
I think somehow this is all a metaphor for life. I’m not completely sure what that metaphor is and maybe I never will know but each day, it seems like I understand it a bit better. Right now, I’m thinking that it means I can try to control as much of my life as possible, but there’s going to be a lot of it that I cannot control and gets out of my hands. And peanut butter care is a difficult thing to master. More the second one, I think.
But in the end, all I really want is to preserve the top of my peanut butter and not have it slide down the jar. Is that really so much to ask?
Remember the time we made peanut butter and then your food processor broke?! nom nom nom
That was a good day. I think I went through two or three of those food processors. They just weren’t strong enough for the stickiness of peanut butter. That’s a whole different peanut butter dilemma.