We are all ever changing cakes.

What if we are all doing the very best we can at any given moment in time?

I have come to this general conclusion, or belief:

Our actions, decisions, accomplishments, lack thereof, etc., are all quite, if not predictable, then understandable given the ingredients that are baked into our respective cakes.

We are all a “cake” at any given moment in time. It’s the sum total of all that goes into who we are....and….that can change with the very next moment as we get more ingredients to add . We all have different ingredients in our cake….and different quantities of those ingredients….

When you see me next I will surely be a different “cake” then at this very moment. Isn’t that how it works after all… we add experiences and realizations to our present list of ingredients (both learned and via our genetics), and it changes us?

A person born with a high I.Q., to very loving and caring parents, in a great neighborhood…has very different ingredients than someone born with less intelligence, to a single mother, in a poor section of town with no opportunity, surrounded by crime. Those “cakes” will be very different…..

The story of Oprah Winfrey is often used to illustrate how someone can take a desperately unfortunate childhood and somehow parlay that into a fantastical life. Most of us know that Oprah was born into a poor, broken, family and she was sexually abused repeatedly, by cousins, uncles, her mother’s boyfriends, as early as the age of 9. She had an abortion at 14. It was enough for any young girl to turn to a life of drugs, depression, or even suicide. We all know that Oprah took a very different turn. She is one of the most successful Americans of all time…an inspiration to countless millions.

But, what about a girl born to similar circumstances who ended up in prison, or on “crack”, or in prostitution? Is that girl inferior to Oprah? Should we excoriate her and praise Oprah? What if Oprah had an ability or perspective, “ingredients” that gave her the ability to rise above her childhood tragedies? She clearly did! In the same way, perhaps, that LeBron James is able to rise above virtually all others in the game of basketball. And, what if this other girl whose life ended up in drugs and prostitution didn’t have those “ingredients”. Society says that Oprah made better decisions. She was strong. What if “strength” was part of her cake, one of her ingredients? Certainly, making it to the NBA as LeBron James has is going to be largely dependent on the skills that you possess…the ones you were born with….your “ingredients”. LeBron was born strong and to be a super power on the basketball court.

What if Oprah always had the “ingredients” to be able to rise above her horrific childhood, or what if she was exposed to some new ingredients later in life that allowed her to transcend her tragedies, perhaps a mentor or a great teacher or an experience?

Remember when we were in elementary school….and from the outset there were always kids who seemed to have confidence, or they were popular, or they could speak in front of the class without fear, or they were leaders, etc.? And, conversely there were kids who were very shy, terrified of speaking up in class, and maybe not so popular?

Is it fair to say that these kids have different “ingredients” in their cakes? It’s not as if the popular, confident kid studied harder to be popular or he made better decisions or persevered in order to be comfortable in the spotlight. Is it not clearly the ingredients in the same way that shatterproof glass has ingredients that non shatterproof glass does not have?

It’s dangerous to separate society into “winners” and “losers”. We don’t even know the rules of the game, and they are far from fair. We can’t get remotely close to seeing the full picture. We look at a person from a snapshot in time and we judge them by the same criteria that we apply to our own lives, yet the circumstances are always completely different. It is a very myopic view. It’s judging the book without reading it.

Remember the baseball metaphor about the guy who was born on 3rd base but goes through life thinking he hit a triple?

How about people who have opportunity or adequate intelligence but who seem to not take advantage of it…or those who squander success? A friend of mine in high school had a perfect SAT score. He got a full scholarship to UCLA. 10 years later he was working at a Blockbuster Video Rentals. What went wrong? Is it because those people are flawed or weak? Well, if they are weak couldn’t it be because they don’t have the ingredients to overcome weakness? They either weren’t born with it or they didn’t acquire it through life experience. We don’t (or shouldn’t) admonish a slow runner for not being fast….yet we celebrate the fast runner for being fast…it’s almost like celebrating a tall person just for being tall….as if they did something extraordinary to make themselves tall. You could say it’s like giving someone credit for being physically attractive when in fact they had nothing whatsoever to do with their looks. In our world of suspect measurements, a person’s physical appearance would appear to be the least meaningful. Yet, you could argue that our culture is more obsessed with physical appearance than anything else.

Of all the characteristics I possess, I think the one that I most cherish is empathy. It now comes naturally to me…more so now than ever. I often wonder how I attained empathy. I do know that since I had my own kids I see other people differently and my empathy is heightened. I see my kid's faces in the faces of others and realize that everyone is someone’s child. I gained that perspective from being a parent. I did nothing to deserve it…it seems more like a gift in the same way that athletic ability is a gift. I can’t take credit for it. It’s one of my ingredients that I was either exposed to or given….and it goes into my “cake”.

Let’s face it…some people are born with inadequate ingredients to navigate successfully through life. If I asked you to bake a cake with every conceivable ingredient available and I asked someone else to bake one without milk or eggs or butter or sugar would it be fair to judge the cakes by the same standards?

I used to run marathons…I ran a lot of them. I was lucky that I never had a single injury during (or after) any of those marathons…lots of people had to pull out of those marathons due to various reasons…fatigue, pain, injury, dehydration, etc…..why didn’t I? Was I stronger? Maybe it appears that way through a narrow lens but I don’t think I should get any credit for being "stronger". If I had experienced the same type of fatigue or pain or injury, or dehydration in the same way that those people did who had to drop out of those races I would have stopped too. I was just lucky…nothing special, just lucky to have some of the needed ingredients. I was doing the best I could at each and every moment in each and every marathon I was running. I did much better in some marathons than in others, because I added “ingredients”....(experience and improved fitness).

Some people can smoke a pack a cigarettes a day and not get lung cancer...I have a family friend who was a health food fanatic and she never smoked a cigarette in her life and she died of lung cancer. We know some people have immune systems that can stave off disease better than others...why would we not assume that mental and emotional capacities are not the same? The biochemical mix of hormones, neurotransmitters, etc., is very delicate. Some people are afflicted with tremendous anxiety from an early age, some have very addictive personalities and they will be fighting those battles every day of their lives. The biochemistry in the human brain is a soup of chemicals....the wrong elixir of chemicals, too much of one component over another can lead to tremendously dysfunctional behavior. I saw my otherwise incredibly stable 85 year father turn completely anxious and suicidal almost overnight as a result of some chemical imbalance in his brain. He was given the right medication to balance his biochemistry and he immediately went back to his old self...That was 6 years ago and he is the same old dad he always was.

And, for the people who had to drop out of those marathons…or the ones who never even thought they wanted to or could run a marathon…they were doing the very best that they could at those moments as well….

Nobody does more than they are capable of (at that given moment in time)…and if they push beyond their (perceived) limits it is only because they have the ingredients to do that…they have that extra gear, perspective, capacity.

We don’t beat ourselves up because we can’t play basketball as well as LeBron James or golf like Tiger Woods…..so why do we beat ourselves up for our lack of aptitude or strength in other areas of life? Worse still, why does society "beat up" those who can't seem to compete with the rest of us? Yes, we can always add to our ingredients, but ONLY if we have the "ingredients" to be able to add more ingredients….if that makes any sense.

For example…say we are in a rut with something….and then we come across a book…and we have the “ingredients” within ourselves to see the value in that book and pick it up and read it…AND, it adds to our ingredients such that we are able to get out of that rut…the act of picking up that book is an “ingredient” all to itself. Some people just don’t have whatever it takes to even pick up the book, seek help, or try to improve.

What if we are ALL doing the very best we can at any given moment?

For all we know and can say about Donald Trump I think we can surmise that Trump was exposed to a misogynistic father and he was exposed to a world that had him at the center where he didn’t have to consider anyone else…or maybe he was ignored as a child and he is grossly insecure and his coping mechanisms call for him to be an attention seeker. If Obama had been born to Trump’s parents we would not likely have the same outcome…Obama, in that scenario, may not have grown up to be like Trump, but he may be something other than he is today….his innate “ingredients” may have mixed with those developmental ingredients to make an Obama who is very different from the one we know.

Luckily, I was never exposed to acts of racism or sexism. I was the beneficiary of having been surrounded by parents, social contacts, other family members, who never exhibited racist or sexists language or behavior. But, what if my parents had racist beliefs that they acquired from their parents? Would I have had the ingredients to overcome the racist ingredients that I was exposed to? We will never know. I wasn’t “good”, I was lucky.

We see people in a snapshot in time….but if we could take a stranger that we see sitting at a bus stop and watch a time lapse movie of their entire life we would see a much bigger picture, and many of the ingredients that make up that person's life. What if we could live every experience and emotion that that person went through to get to that point at that bus stop? Instead, we tend to see people as if they have the same ingredients that we have…and we come into their movie half way through...and we don't often understand what is going on, and we judge their cake anyways.

When someone takes their own life out of desperation…they have done the best they could at that moment to assuage their pain. They don’t have any more ability to resist. They did the best they could….we know that because ending your own life is so terminal and irreversible that complete helplessness and desperation must have taken over. If someone had come into that person’s life a few hours before the suicide to give them enough added “ingredients” to overcome the desire to end their life the story would develop differently.

Imagine we all had the exact same “ingredients”, both innate and learned…if our minds and hearts were all the same and we were exposed to the exact same set of experiences…wouldn’t we ALL make the exact same decisions?…..No one would be weaker or smarter or richer or more pathetic or more of a loser or more of a winner than ANYONE else……and, doesn’t this happen to a great degree with identical twins? They often live very parallel lives, down to precise details. Their genetics are the same and many of their life experiences growing up are the same since they grew up in the same family under identical circumstances. They often end up dressing the same and wearing their hair the same. Identical twins who are raised in the same household have very similar socio-economic status when they grow to be adults.

We know from studies that people who are born into single family homes have a much lower rate of going to college, much higher likelihood of going to prison, or going on welfare, etc…growing up in a single parent family is a heck of an ingredient (or lack of it) apparently…

Being born into poverty is another incredibly powerful “ingredient”. We know this from studies. Being physically attractive is a very big indicator of financial success. Studies show this.

“Picking yourself up by your bootstraps sounds simple enough…but the stars have to be aligned to do this…you have to have the “bootstraps” to begin with…and the ability to bend down. Some people are missing a boot, or their strap is broken. We don’t expect someone in a wheelchair to be able to run up a flight of stairs.

Maybe society should create less winners and losers. We should see everyone as going through their own battles and trials based on entirely different circumstances.

"Survival of the Fittest" is the law of the land in the animal kingdom...the slowest zebra will be caught by a pack of lions...but we, the human race...should be not only smarter than that but much more compassionate for those "slow zebras" in our midst. We should take no pleasure in outrunning the other zebras and we should not be indifferent when the "slow zebra" becomes a lion's lunch.

Compassion is an ingredient, too. You can be a billionaire and not have it. In fact, if you ARE a billionaire you probably lack adequate compassion. And don't forget selfishness and greed...they are also ingredients that are in almost every cake that is ever baked. An otherwise beautiful cake with frosting and rainbow sprinkles might taste very bitter if it has selfishness and greed...it will look delicious on the outside until you take a bite.

p.s. the greatest gift we can make to humanity is to help others to get the ingredients they need to make their "cakes" the best that they can be. (my opinions)

Food for Thought.....