Sunday Night With John: Pepper Jelly! WOW!

How did it take 30 years for me to discover the unbelievable deliciousness of pepper jelly, cream cheese and crackers? When it is served at a party I attend, you can find around the pepper jelly adding it to my plate, or on my way to the pepper jelly to add more to my plate. Anne, my fiancée, introduced it to me a while ago and I was hooked, and I do spend some time thinking about how something I like a lot eluded me for this long.

I would venture to say it’s because we get stuck in our little worlds and forget we live in a great big world with all sorts of traditions, customs, and food that they have crafted through time. When I was younger, I was closed off to new things and got rather nervous about doing something wrong, tasting something gross, and embarrassing myself.  The problem with tasting something gross lasts as long as it takes to spit it out and find a big glass of something to drink it away. That’s a total of 15 seconds tops.  So for 15 seconds of discomfort, I was willing to deny myself years of perfectly enjoyable food.  This newfound openness has led me to find pepper jelly, a bunch of Asian dishes, spring rolls, onions, and a bunch of other things. It also has shown me I was right about mushrooms, peas, and sushi at least when it comes to my taste buds.

Tying new activities such a mountain biking, cross-country skiing, back backing, listening to music outside my comfort zone has lead to new friendships, deeper relationships and more stories for me to share when I talk.  It has also had an effect of my family, friends, as I have drug them along with me to attempt new things with me.  It also leads to your family and friends being willing to stretch themselves into new activities because they see how much fun it can be.  Next thing you know, you are no longer complaining about being bored, but complaining about having too much to do.  Now that’s a problem worth having.

New food, new activities, and new moments have a way of reinvigorating our emotions, our thoughts, our body, and our soul. We all know those are good things to do yet we spend an awful lot of time avoiding them to spare us from 15 minutes of discomfort. The only thing wrong with that is we might be denying ourselves a lifetime of a food, activity, tradition, or event that we will always enjoy.  15 minutes vs. years of enjoyment is easy math to me.

I know I don’t want to miss out on my next pepper jelly experience.  It was just too much fun discovering something at 30 and have a WOW reaction. What else does this world have to offer?  I’m on a mission to find out as much as I can and I hope to have a lot of you along for the ride.