My Momma always said, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”
This famous dialogue was quoted repeatedly in “Forrest Gump” (亞甘正傳), the 1994 multiple Oscars winning movie which has since catapulted into one of the all-time favorites of the American Movie Institute. Our family liked the movie so much that we even bought a box of “Forrest Gump Chocolates” with this quotation on top of the box. The chocolates are long gone, but the box is still in our keeping.
The movie is a tale with a clever and uplifting plot. It is more about spirituality than realism, and the messages are conveyed through historic events enmeshed within fantasies. Forrest’s mother used chocolates as an example to depict the elements of sweetness, diversity and surprise in life which also reflected her simplistic but positive view of life.
How can we go wrong with chocolates unless the whole box is stale or moldy? It is rare to find both freshness and staleness within the same box of chocolates, so is life only one dimensional?
I don’t think so! If we consider our lives as just “good” or “bad” we are merely exercising our selective memory which can only be helpful on occasions when mostly it is not.
To me, life is like eating a sour plum candy (話梅糖). I still remember clearly what happened when I ate that first one.
There are several types of sour plum candy on the market today. The one I ate had a whole sour plum of one inch in diameter embedded in a thick layer of crystalized maltose. I was much younger and more adventurous in those days, besieged by impetuosity and a false sense of immortality! The candy was so big that it barely fit in my mouth. The sweetness of the maltose awakened my blasé salivary glands and they went into overdrive. If I did not drool like my dog Caesar snacking on his treats, I was pretty close to it. The possibility of having the candy lodged in the esophagus because the sloshing saliva was making the maltose surface dangerously slippery was totally oblivious to me, I was savoring the sweetness until the layer of maltose was partially consumed and the sour plum was exposed.
The taste of sourness and saltiness exploded in my mouth. Within a fraction of a second the taste buds on my tongue fired off an ultimatum to my brain, “your candy has turned weird, do something!!!”
My intuitive right brain made me spit out the candy onto my open palm, I stared at it, processed the thought for a few seconds, then my reasoning left brain made the executive decision to pop the candy back into my mouth. That was the only time that I spat out a sour plum candy, and I have had many since.
The bombardment of the unexpected senses created an instant stressful dilemma. Instinctively I chose “flight” rather than “fight” by spitting out the candy, but something amazing happened! Suddenly it dawned on me that the sourness and saltiness of the sour plum had actually accentuated the sweetness of the maltose; sweetness lingered on even after the maltose had completely melted away. The whole process made the sour plum more palatable, and it also made me crave for more candy, with its sweetness, sourness, saltiness and all.
Trauma, whether they are the result of human errors or natural disasters, can ambush our lives causing pain and grief. There will be days when we feel like we have been hit by a Peterbilt dump truck. How many times can we sustain those types of trauma? Thankfully our Creator has designed and installed within us many innate physiological and psychological mechanisms that enable us to get through most of these days. From the blood platelets, the immune system, the amoeba-like tendency of moving out of harm’s way and the nervous systems to the ability to assess a situation, to reason, and to ask for help or to selflessly help others to overcome adversity; all powered by His gift of Hope and the Will to Live.
Can we be satisfied with the explanation that this intricate system we loosely call “life” is originated from a random collision of particles? Or random un-seemingly interconnected events are simply ‘coincidence’?
For many of us, to ponder about life is almost as natural as to look for food when we are hungry. The quest is driven by the innate need to improve our quality of life, but more importantly, by the need to know the truth.
Jesus Christ says, “I am the Way, and the truth, and the life…” (John 14:6). His life and teaching epitomize the Way to a truthful life, but for the past two centuries, human beings have often been beguiled by untimely interludes of misrepresentation and misinterpretation.
It’s time to challenge our selective memory on what we think we know about Jesus Christ and to rethink the meaning of life.
Raymond Li
07/08/2013
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