The Taste of Burnt

Throughout my life there have been times when I have burned my food in a toaster, on the stove, or a multitude of other ways. And although I watch the stuff I am cooking pretty closely to catch it before the food turns into a hard, blackened rock, it still happens. I do not think anyone can claim they have never burned something, so this should be quite understandable. But what I am learning is that while I burn food, I admit it and I still eat what I burned. Over the years of burning food for various reasons, I have actually come to appreciate the taste of burnt food, the taste of failure so to speak. What I am getting at is I have accepted my failure and taken it, even appreciated it. Admittedly, I will burn a bagel every now and then for that different flavor.

Yet in my lifetime, though short as the stay has been as of right now, I have started to realize that not everyone is like me when it comes to their mistakes. They burn the food and then throw it out and try again. I can understand throwing out something that you do not like, but to toss out your failure and not see the errors of your way is maddening. And maybe the whole idea of this comes from a part of me that knows there is no infinite amount of anything, that in truth everything has a quantity value to it. I cannot burn a million bagels and still feed the world, let alone my check book cannot buy a million bagels, so where do others get off thinking that they should be allowed to burn more food because they failed the first time.

I think this perspective of oh I failed I will try again without seeing if there was a mistake the first time is something we have come to just accept in America. "Oh I failed that test, I guess I'll just have to do better next time" or "Oh I burned my Poptart today, guess I'll just put another one in the toaster." It becomes a sort of pattern, an American experience per say, that you can fail in life and you do not need to live through the consequences of your failure. I think we should change that perspective. And the easiest way to go about teaching people that there is this moral dilemma between always thinking there will be more of whatever is to tell them they do not get a second chance. That you need to take your failure and see what went wrong, learn from it, enjoy the failure while it happens, and then become better from it. And instead we toss out this idea that failure is something that happened, but maybe a second time will fix it.

I would like to side note and just say I do not think this will fix all of the problems in the world, let alone all the problems in the United States. But this might be a great first-start proving ground for a lot of Americans to learn that they need to try their hardest the first time and they need to succeed. We live in a culture of people that just pitch things away the first time and do not learn from their mistakes, but we should live in a culture that examines what we have and what we want and then make the most out of what we can.

Maybe then we can all enjoy the taste of burnt. Thank you for my short political side-track today.