My office-mates are great about keeping a candy bowl filled at the front desk.  From its prime perch, passers-by can grab themselves a surreptitious Snickers, a chewy caramel crème, or a Tootsie Roll to-go.  Given the season, the recent supply has been jellybeans… big ones, little ones, fruity ones and super-sugary ones.  Who doesn’t love a bowl of jellybeans?  It was all well and good for a few days, until the bowl took on an increasingly dark mood, as the ostracized black jellybeans slowly overtook the party, accompanied by their unpopular friends, the white, puke green and brown teammates (yes, there were brown jellybeans, and they weren’t chocolate).  Being the self-absorbed candy diva that I can be, I was a bit outspoken about its appearance – “That has got to be the ugliest bowl of jellybeans I’ve ever seen!  How am I supposed to find joy in a candy dish that looks like it’s straight out of a Halloween clearance sale??  Where are our black jellybean eaters??  They need to get on the stick!”

Well, our primary black jellybean connoisseur is my friend Amy, so I marched over to her desk to find out just why she wasn’t stepping up to the plate.  Turns out, she has been trying really, really hard to NOT indulge in what, to her, are super tempting treats.  She’s trying to eat well and make healthy choices.  And, apparently, based on the off-balanced color scheme, she is the only one in the office who is succeeding.  My pleading face was met with her equally adamant plea, saying, “please don’t tempt me… I’m trying so hard to be good,” while she shook some green Tabasco sauce onto hard boiled eggs because she knows they’re good for her, but that is the only way she can choke them down.  And, suddenly, I realized that what was, moments ago, an ugly bowl of jellybeans, was now a beautiful sight.  Because it means she is succeeding.  She’s winning, even in the stressful environment of work, where we all succumb to a quick dose of comfort on the way by the bowl, and I was really proud of her!  It takes a lot of determination to resist temptations.  And, when someone comes along who is acting like a cross between Snow White’s evil queen and Mommy Dearest with her proclamations of what does and does not represent an appropriate ratio of confections, it can be very easy to just grab a fistful of sugar on the way by to bring things back to order and shut me up. 

So, I suddenly started seeing that candy dish as a beautiful bowlful of victories… a symbol of someone’s success… and it changed my whole disposition.  It also caused me to remember that the sweet colleague filling that bowl each day and sitting them front and center on her very own desk, despite her own major sweet tooth, gave up sweets for Lent but still keeps the bowl filled because she knows it makes others happy.  And, and that, my friends, is no easy feat.  And, let’s face it, if all the red and orange and pink ones are now gone, that’s less temptation for me, as well.  So, at the end of the day, we’re all winning. 

Eventually, someone did come along and eat up those black treats.  And, when no one was looking, some other unknown visitor actually arranged the remaining cast-offs into an impromptu smiley face – an ultimate reminder that things are not always as they appear, and joy can be found in the strangest of places, if only you take the time to look at something from a different perspective.  Today, let’s take the time to recognize another’s victory, and cheer them on from the sidelines.  There will always be room for chocolate bunnies and Peeps on another day.