Life and crunchy peaches

Last week I had some friends over for dinner. I am not a cook and I do not entertain often because I get so nervous that the food won’t turn out or something else will go wrong. Now preparing a dinner for these particular friends has an added complication due to the fact that they are vegan and I certainly am not. Last month’s dinner didn’t go too badly, I managed to cook up some mushrooms and some form of non meat chicken...whatever that is.   So this month I decided to take the easy route and do frozen pizza. How simple eh. I had no idea what to do for dessert and another friend suggested peaches. So I went and bought some the day before the dinner and without thinking I put them in the fridge where of course they wouldn’t ripen. To make matters worse the afternoon before the dinner did not go well so I didn’t bake or create anything with them as I had planned. As I cut up the peaches they were hard and crisp and I realized I hadn’t given the peaches the time or the atmosphere to mature into their ripened state and they were certainly not going to be their best. Following dinner, with not other ideas or options, I served my guests the peaches with a small bit of ice-cream.  They were good people and ate the hard, crunchy, non flavourful fruit with very little complaint. I must say there was the odd funny comment from one of them who didn’t really believe they could possibly even be peaches but it gave us all a laugh. Now a week later I have eaten the last two peaches, which I had left out to nicely ripen. They were so good, full of sweet flavourful juice. They were at that stage where they were their very best.

It got me to thinking about life and wondering, are we like those peaches?  As we journey through life are we ripening?  When we are younger we have so much to learn, are sometimes less confident and spend our time wondering what we should do with our lives. As we age we become more comfortable with whom we are and we seem to know what we want from life and what is right for us. We finally feel comfortable in our own skin and are more accepting to who we are and spend less time being concerned about what others may think. We are middle aged and beyond and we are at our best.   So it has me wondering. Is that what this life here on earth is all about? We start off like a small bloom, and grow into a lovely fruit.  When we leave home we have been “picked” to journey onward on our own. With care and love and warmth we will ripen and grow into the people we were meant to be and know we are loved for who we are. We are full of flavour, mature and at our very best. Later in life our bodies will start to fail us, like peaches left too long. As our bodies decline and prepare to return to the earth, I don’t believe our soul, the part of us that makes us who we are, will ever lose it's sweet, juicy flavourful self, it is ripened and ready for the next stage of our journey whatever that may be.

Hmmm, something to think more about. As I head towards turning 50 I hope I have reached that ripened state and have left behind my hard, crunchy unsure self. :)