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Gloomy People Focus on the FOMO. Happy People Focus on the Ice Cream.
When given a choice, always go for the ice cream
They say “the sweet is never as sweet without the sour.” I believe this to be true. And that it’s one of the most underrated quotes in all of history.
Because to me, it doesn’t just refer to the supposed entrapments of beautiful successful people born with a silver spoon in their mouths. In my mind, it’s the sheer contrast of nearly every single facet of our lives.
Do you remember as a child, the first time you ate a chocolate chip cookie and thought, “This has to be the greatest invention ever made!” only to completely renounce that notion when you first dipped your spoon into chocolate chip ice cream?
Even though the cookie wasn’t sour, it still made the ice cream that much sweeter. That much better. And you knew it was better because you already ate something positively amazing — and now you’re munching on something somehow even amazing-er.
It’s pure magic when this happens.
But when do we stop to think about the opposite? When the sweet chocolate chips become bland cardboard bits. When we seemingly can’t get our hands on those illusively tasty little brown chunks ever again.
What do we do when we find ourselves completely stuck in the sour?
My sour is the feeling of going home. Or rather, the act of wishing I could, but being unable to. Not truly. Because a once-a-century pandemic decided to pop up and slap us in our collective faces in the rudest of ways.
All the way over here in Taiwan, far, far away from my childhood home in Canada, I’m just left with my imagination. A soured imagination missing the taste of sweeter times.
One that can’t help but sit in my idle mind in a quarantined neighborhood dancing as a devil’s plaything. My imagination — when I let it — sits there and sours itself.
It spends its days and sleepless nights pondering all of the missed birthdays, and holidays, and weddings, and hugs, and chocolate chip ice creams that it can’t imbibe on anymore.
It does this for such a long period it would even stoop so low as to imagine…
