Eating Cake

I watched with great interest as the little boy across from me ate his birthday cake.  Carefully he scraped every bit of icing off of the top and sides (he had specifically asked for a piece with a rose on it for extra frosting).  It made a small mound on his plate beside his, suddenly unclothed, piece of chocolate cake.

Then, like the wolf swallowing the duck in Peter and the Wolf, he swallowed it all in just two mouthfuls.

He licked his lips and inspected his cake.  No, there was no other icing to be seen.  "Mom," he announced a moment later.  "I'm full.  Can I go out and play?"

I suppose it isn't an unusual thought that there are three ways to eat cake, the same as there are three ways to Oreos.  There are those who scrape off their icing and eat it first, there are those who scrape off their icing and eat it last, and then there are those "mature" eaters who eat the whole lot together.

Well, and then there are a few miserable souls who don't eat cake at all because it would be bad for their figure.  But of those, we will not speak.

It doesn't really matter how you eat your cake, but it does seem to me that people tend to take the same ideas to the ways in which they break down every day tasks as they do to ingesting cake.  There are those who save their hardest chores for last, those who do them first, and those who do a mixture of them.

I tend to be of the personality to get the hardest things out of the way with first, but there is really something to be said for doing a mixture.  Spending extended time grinding away on things we don't enjoy, without an occasional break with something we like, will wear any one of us down.

Ecclesiastes tells us "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might..."  Enjoyable tasks, jobs that are just a grind require the same commitment.

All your might...

That is the challenge.  It is easy to go full bore at things we enjoy doing, but not so easy to work through jobs that we don't -- particularly not to do them with all our strength and focus.

It might be nice to have no hard, onerous tasks, but that is not the way of things.  Most of the time, we have to finish our green beans before we can even look at our cake -- regardless of whether or not it has icing.

Regardless of how we separate our jobs out through each day, let us work at them with a will.  Those who only eat cake are bound to have some nutritional deficiencies later on in life.