ICE CREAM AND FLAVOURS

              

                                                    

If someone calls me a sweet tooth, the person might not entirely be wrong. Amongst the toothsome things that are agreeable to my palate, ice cream about tops the list. There is something about walking into an ice cream parlor and seeing all those different flavors beckoning at you from behind their glassy sanctuary. Chocolate, butter pecan, vanilla, coffee, strawberry, chocolate, name it. They make my gastric juices pop like a profusion of lilies in June.

Sometimes I wonder how life would have been if it were a huge tub of one flavored ice cream. Very boring I would bet, even for ice cream lovers.

Just like with frozen dessert there is something about variety that adds to life and beauty. This also applies to human beings. The sweetness of life is in our diversity. The assortment of gifts, complexion, complexities, race, taste, style, etcetera that we all possess in varying degrees make our world fun and exciting.

You would agree that what enlivens any circus show or carnival is its multiplicity of acts. Each new act injects verve into the show like gas into a racing Ferrari. Each show is unique but together like enmeshing gears they combine to produce a phenomenal display. In war video games, you would see that to defeat an enemy, the soldiers usually have different personalities, one might be a marksman, another, an explosives expert, one might be a machine gun carrier, the other a sapper. Their victory lies heavily on their different specialties.

But the tragedy is that the distinction of our diverseness is lost on us a whole lot of the time. In the cartoon little mermaid, Sebastian the lobster said the seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake; alas this applies to quite a number of people. Like Ariel, the underwater princess, we have a treasure filled trove within us, we possess whozits and whatzits galore but we think its no big deal. We want what someone else has got, we desire to be a part of someone else’s world and be their kind of vanilla because vanilla is supposed to be the rave. The beauty of people who are releasing their flavor to bless the world and the rewards that accrue to them make us want to be them. We would rather squeeze ourselves into someone else’s mould than be us. It would appear that being a clone has more appeal than being an original.

But the truth of the matter is that we all have something to offer in the act of life and no one else can do what we were born to do better than us. We are the only one of our kind just like fingerprints and voiceprints. Without you and me, life would be incomplete. The world would be like a rainbow missing some of its colors. You are the blue, I am the violet. And no color supersedes another. Without our unique individual colors, the rainbow of life will be dark and grey.

We are much more special than we usually think, so there’s no reason to envy any other person.  You are so essential to our world but the problem might be that you have locked up your essence for too long. This might just explain why you feel pretty ordinary. Can you imagine buying your favorite ice cream flavor on a very sunny day and scooping it into your mouth with feverish anticipation but instead of it exploding like a confectionery bomb on your buds, it is all tasteless and insipid. Disappointment and anger will make you spit it out in a hurry. The whole exercise becomes a waste of time and resources.

The verbal illustration above is a depiction of how we are when we don’t release our natural endowments. Our world does not feel us; we are dull and uninteresting, bowed and dejected. Releasing our talents gives us a lift and makes us soar like a Peregrine falcon ruling its skies.

There’s so much locked inside you like an invaluable pearl in an oyster shell. It could be your singing, dancing, football skills, writing, baking, administrative skills, leadership ability, drawing, the list is inexhaustible. Sometimes we can be likened to nameless designer perfumes amongst numerous others on the shelves of the mall of life with our fragrance locked in our containers. Unless our stuff is released, no one will perceive our aroma. Become a self triggered atomizer, fill the olfactory cells of the earth with your essence and take the world to dizzying heights. Saturate your atmosphere because YOUR NAME IS IN YOUR FLAVOUR!!! The name of the butter pecan ice cream is what it is because it tastes like butter pecan and not strawberry, and likewise every other flavor. Michael Jackson is called the “king of pop”, Pele is called the “black pearl”, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is known as the” great one”, Hippocrates is the father of medicine, Mohammed Ali is called “the greatest”, Henry Ford is the father of the automobile, Picasso name is associated with masterpieces and so on.

So the question is, what can you do? WHAT IS YOUR FLAVOUR BRO/SIS?