Overloaded!

This week, the early apples started dropping off the trees in my yard. Quite a few came down after a (welcome) overnight rain storm!

These drop apples (which I too often call dropples) are part of a normal thinning process, as the tree sheds excess fruit that it can’t support to maturity. There will still be plenty of apples in my fall harvest!

Alas – not wanting to waste anything, I looked into potential uses for these dropples. I came across the recipe for making pectin – it entails boiling these tart early apples for an hour, straining the mash, and reducing the resultant juice. Easy enough!

The challenge came mid-way through the process – I had had *just* enough room in my pot for the apples… and I had presumed I could get away with it.

However, once they started boiling, it was a different story. The pot was overloaded, and thus overflowing, and my what a mess!

After the boiling process was complete, and the straining underway, I pondered how many times I could have intervened to prevent the overflow – and yet had not done. I could have pulled out a bigger pot when I was chopping them and recognised the dilemma… or when the boiling started and the volume increased… or when the overflow was scorching on the stovetop…

Perhaps I was distracted and hadn’t noticed the amount. Maybe I should have been paying more attention as the water boiled. Maybe my indifference made me consider the spillage inconsequential. Perchance I just resigned myself to cleaning up the mess, and so didn’t care when it just got messier and messier.

Regardless: it was a mess. And I was left to clean it up.

It made me reflect on other aspects of life – how we so often can get overwhelmed by our to-do lists, our intentions, our expectations (from ourselves and others); and we miss out on seeing/recognising/availing ourselves of our ability to adjust to a better circumstance: with our relationships, with our faith, with our choices. And so, we end up with the result that we aimed for, but potentially also with a mess to clean up.

Life can feel overwhelming at times, and if we’re not careful, we’re the mess in the pot – simply wishing for enough space to do what we need to do, without making a mess. And wondering why we didn’t choose, so many times, to change the situation so we would have that space.

Perhaps we could un-load just one small piece this week, to allow ourselves the space to just be.