The Stirred Pot

I love soup. I enjoy all types of soup, soup happens to be one of my favorite meals. There is something warm and comforting about a big bowl of soup. When I make soup, I pour over it checking the soup to see its progress, and tasting the soup to see if it needs any more seasoning and finally stirring the pot of soup so that all the flavors blend. Sometimes I will watch the soup continue to turn in the pot after I remove the spoon. It is interesting to see everything continue to move in a spiral motion even though the spoon is removed.

I do not enjoy when my life's pot is stirred, because then the spiral motion after the spoon is removed is not as interesting. This spiral motion causes stress. You are left spending a lot of time reevaluating what just happened, rethinking what happened and waking at night wanting to give the pot stirrer a piece of your mind. There are plenty of pot stirrers out there and I wish I understood what they actually gain by behaving that way. I cannot imagine that these people have many friends. Eventually the people around the stirrer must get tired of their routine and quietly sneak away.

In the life pot that spiral motion does not slow easily. Even though the pot stirrer may move on, the person they have stirred most times is left agitated and frustrated. The life pot does not settle down as easily as your pot of soup. The life pot continues to spin and your brain continues to spin with it. Many times inside the spinning life pot you find yourself thinking things like, who does that? What the heck was that all about? There are probably a few other thoughts, but I think it is best to not write those.

I love soup and I especially enjoy making soup. I enjoy the process of chopping vegetables and browning the meat. I love preparing the soup base and piling in all the delicious layers of flavor and watching them all blend together in the pot, but I am feeling less drawn to stirring that pot these days. If nothing else I am very aware of how dangerous it can be to over stir. By stirring to much you can possible cause an imbalance in the way that your pot of soup turns out, after all that work it would be very disappointing to find you had ruined the soup. I am starting to think that stirring the pot is not really necessary and that if we just leave the pot alone, everything will turn out just fine.