“Ewwwwww! It’s so gross!”
“Just eat it and then you can go play!”
“Ugh…. okayyyy”
This is me. 9 years old. Arguing with my mom. I didn’t want to eat the chosen vegetables for the evening meal and I was putting up a fight.
Sometimes as a kid I would do this if I really didn’t want to eat a certain food. I’d die on that hill, too. No way, no how. No surrender.
Until eventually I’d give way to conventional wisdom and realize there was no way out. One night my brothers and I actually consumed brussels sprouts because otherwise we’d never be able to leave the table. Mom was basically a drill sergeant.
What we didn’t take into account was all the time we wasted making our case to not eat the stuff. We’d sacrifice play time just to sit there and concoct a way out of vegetables at dinner.
Just eat the dang broccoli, wash it down with milk, and go! That’s what I should’ve done.
I watch a lot of people make mountains out of the small things. It happens every day. Pride does this. It tells us to take a stand. People rarely want to swerve first when they play chicken.
Someone else will change. Someone else should change. The inconvenience should fall on somebody else. I shouldn’t have to change my schedule.
People are so afraid of being walked on, they overcompensate. They’re polite, but not too polite. Not too nice. Don’t give an inch because they’ll surely take a mile.
“And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well”
Matthew 5:40
The amount of time we spend in tunnels of wasted space can be alarming. I know it is for me. My own thoughts are torturous sometimes. A lot of us are in our own heads, having arguments with ourselves half the time.
Like rehearsal, we say our lines out loud in an empty room, as if our point gets across better in a meaningless argument. It turns out we’re not all 9 and we’re not all arguing over food.
But sometimes you just gotta eat your vegetables and leave the table.