We were sitting around the family dinner table, ready to eat soup. Well, our picky little boys were about to eat a separate dinner their mom made for them.
“Potato soup is one of my favorites,” Megan said as I spooned cupfuls of it into my overflowing bowl.
Without missing a beat, our 5-year-old scoffed.
“Potatoes aren’t soup!”
I mean, you can’t argue with his logic. It doesn’t matter how much I like potatoes in my soup. Nor does it matter how many potatoes you stuff in said soup. Potatoes are potatoes. Soup is soup. You might put potatoes in soup to make potato soup. But potatoes, in fact, aren’t soup.
I wonder how often I do this, equating two things so closely that I forget that they aren’t actually the same thing. How often do I do this to myself?
Am I really what I do for a living? Or what I spend my time doing? What have I believed about myself for so long that I’ve forgotten it’s only part of who I am? What small things have I allowed to define me?
My little guy is right. Potatoes aren’t soup.
And even the parts of ourselves that take up the most room aren’t the whole of who we are.