a can of soup
One cold rainy afternoon I was searching through my pantry looking for something nourishing to eat. I was tired, cold and sick and my cupboard was bear except for two canned goods with the commercial labels removed. One had “chicken noodle” written on it and the other “lima beans”. So I pulled out a soup pot and put it on the stove and opened the can marked “chicken noodle”. To my dismay it turned out to be a can of peaches; not that I don’t like peaches, I just was really looking forward to a can of chicken noodle soup. The can marked “lima beans” sat unopened in my cupboard for months after that. I don’t really care for lima beans so never even bothered to open the can. Then one day my husband grabbed the can of lima beans and opened them up for dinner, only to find it was a can of chicken noodle soup.
So the morel of the story is, just because it looks like a can of soup, and someone tells you it’s a can of soup, unless you actually look in the can and see for yourself, it might be a can of peaches. On the other hand, it might look like a can of lima beans and you may believe that it is a can of lima beans because someone told you it was lima beans and you may completely ignore the can of lima beans because you don’t care for lima beans, when all along it was the warm and nourishing soup that you could have really used when you needed it most.
Think of people (friends, family, co-workers, politicians, school mates) like unmarked cans of soup, if you pay too much attention to the label on the outside, you may get a can of peaches when you really need soup, or you might miss out on the soup completely because you didn’t bother to even look in the can.
Written by Deborah Abdulla, a woman who now tries to makes her decisions by looking in the soup can.
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