Life Lessons are like Tootsie Roll Pops

I’m so glad to have you as part of this circle where I share a little something each week or so!  If you’re new here, welcome!

How treating life lessons like Tootsie Roll Pops can help make your life a little sweeter:

Life lessons are not items to be completed or crossed off a list.  This is decidedly fortunate or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it.

Life lessons are like Tootsie Roll Pops.

Or should I say, learning a life lesson is like trying to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop without using your teeth.  It can be painful.  It can be frustrating.  And you can just so badly want to get to the middle and be done with it already.

But at the same time, the closer you get to the center the more delicious and exciting it gets.

This is quite the combination and more than once, I’ve caught myself marveling at how profoundly annoying yet uniquely beautiful this is.  In respect to the life lessons themselves, not Tootsie Roll Pops.  Although…those DO certainly sound delicious.

Anyway, this happened to me just a few weeks ago.  With the lessons, not real Tootsie Roll Pops.  *Ugh, now I really want a Tootsie Roll Pop!*

I had the opportunity to learn something again for what felt like the billionth time.  In the beginning it felt miserable and I wished I could just skip ahead and mark it off the list.  

But once I made it to the other side, do you know what I realized?  If I had stopped when I first thought I’d learned the lesson and mastered it well enough, I never would have made it to the place where I am now.  I wouldn’t have been able to move past the surface level understanding and I wouldn’t feel it deep in my bones in the same way.

I’ve now been relishing the level of peace I know because of the way I was challenged to press forward, moving deeper and deeper into a beautiful loving center filled with peace.

Try looking back to wherever you were when you started your own journey and celebrate how far you’ve come.  May you savor that sweetness today.

And my hope is that the next time you reach one of those moments with the desperate desire to cross a lesson off the list as “learned for good,” the memory of that sweetness, how great it feels on the other side, will help carry you through.  And just know that each time around the outside gets you that much closer to all of the chocolaty goodness that’s waiting for you at the core.

With love, laughter, and Tootsie Roll Pops!

August 22, 2015