How Life is Like a Single-Serve Bag of Popcorn

I live by analogies. I love them. I can usually find one in just about anything. It is a gift or a curse, you decide.

I like it. It gives me a real-life way of making sense of less sensical things, like life. To my friends’ amusement, I can find reasons and explanations for life in even the most seemingly mundane, inconsequential things.

Take a single-serve bag of microwave popcorn like the one I'm munching on. It's tiny compared to its regular-sized papa, like no big deal. Its popcorn tastes the same, but it's a bit of an oddity for one big reason: there's no definite pop time. Even the directions say it’s different for every microwave, more so than even big papa. 

Kind of like life. You never know what you're going to get. Well, okay, in this case, you're going to get popcorn. But you might get a bag of kernels or you might get a bag of burnt corn. You have to test it out yourself, then modify, then maybe modify again. That's what I had to do (which made me think to write this). The directions said one to one and a half minutes, maybe more, maybe less. Very vague. I started out at one minute and barely got a few kernels to pop. I quickly added 30 seconds. Got a little more. Then ten. Then ten. Then ten again. I was beginning to think I was going to burn it all, so I pulled it out, only to find I still had a half bag of popcorn unpopped. Sad. So next time, I figure I'll start with a minute and a half and go up from there.

The moral of this story? It just got me thinking...it's funny how an innocuous-looking tiny little bag of simple popcorn can personify life - how we dive in, first trying according to directions; then try and try again with more calculation or randomness, hoping to find the sweet spot. With the little bag of popcorn, I may never get it right. In any bag of popcorn, there are always a few kernels that don't pop and there are always the times when it burns. Same with life. You can try and try again, but there is always a possibility of success, always a possibility of a challenge. In my opinion, how you come out of it depends upon perspective more than anything. Me, no matter my success or failure, I plan to munch on the popcorn that popped and enjoy the heck out of it all.