It's an age old phrase. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or maybe it's "when life hands you lemons?" Either way, when life throws bad situations your way, this phrase suggests that you should turn them into good situations. No matter how you spin it, the meaning is generally the same: do your best to make the best out of a bad situation.
When I first found out that my family was moving, I was too blinded by the fact that they were moving out of my childhood home, the place I loved and grew up in to see that they were moving into a nicer, larger home in a beautiful neighborhood. In my mind, at that point in time, life had handed me some lemons, life had handed me a bad situation that I just needed to try to make the best of. Except, that's not what happened. As we've packed up our home and prepared for the move, I've come to realize that life never really handed me a bad situation at all.
Life handed me a chance to see my family in a newer home. Life handed me a chance to learn to be more positive, to see the bright side of things. Life handed me a chance to come home to a bigger back yard for our Fourth of July cookout and nicer dining room and kitchen to make it easier for family meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Life handed me so many things, so many beautiful and wonderful things, but it didn't hand me lemons.
There was no reason for me to try and make the best out of a bad situation because I was never actually handed a bad situation at all, and I think that sort of thing happens to me a lot. Whenever I'm hit with something I don't initially like, or that doesn't look good from the outside, I immediately assume it's something bad, and start looking for ways to make it better, when instead, I should start looking for reasons as to why it isn't actually a bad situation to begin with.
I also think this is something that everyone faces. We all see the bad in situations that might not initially look positive, and even though we take steps to try and make the best out of those situations, we should instead take a second look. We should reevaluate these so call "lemons," or bad situations, because we just might find that they were never actually bad situations to begin with.
When life gives you lemons, yes, you could always just make lemonade, but you might not have to. Take a second to reevaluate, take a second to look at your situation and see it for what it really is. Maybe it's an opportunity, maybe it's a blessing in disguise, maybe it's all sorts of things, but it doesn't have to be a big bunch of lemons. When life gives you lemons, make sure they're actually lemons before you start trying to make lemonade.
