This past weekend, I noticed a change in the weather and you could definitely feel the fall season in the air. For this Arkansas transplant, that means it is chili and cinnamon roll season. To my surprise, I was reminded of this by a few of my colleagues on the sideline of a football game because they remembered me talking about it when I first moved here and they still can't wrap their head around why anyone would eat the two foods together for any reason whatsoever. The simple answer is because it works. The more complex answer involves explaining how to eat the two foods together. Do you graze and move back and forth between the savory and sweet? Do you dip the cinnamon roll in the chili? Do you cover the cinnamon roll with chili? The conversations are entertaining, but usually it comes down to don't knock it until you have tried it. Believe me, it just works.
Jonathan Swift famously said, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” As humans, we have a tendency to make up our minds about certain things before we have experienced them or even tried them. We are certain that things won't work because conventional wisdom tells us so and we want to avoid failure at all costs so we don't have to experience the painful growth that deep self reflection forces us to go through. We are so sure that chili and cinnamon rolls don't go together that we write them off so we don't have to face the fact that we may be wrong. Again, you may be doubting, but it just works.
Whether it is cinnamon rolls and chili or some other unique combination, we all need to realize that each of us has our own quirks that make us unique from one another. We question why people do the things they do without considering that it just works for them. If we could all just take a moment and pause before we pass judgement and really look at things from a different perspective, we may actually learn something about the people we surround ourselves with on a daily basis. We might learn that what we view as someone's flaw, might actually be a tremendous strength for them. We don't need to look at things in disgust, we just need to accept that some people choose to operate differently from us and that it is okay to have a different viewpoint. It doesn't make them better or worse from you, it makes them different.
Indeed, in the immortal words of John Bender, "Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place." You may think that I am crazy for loving a sweet and savory delicacy like cinnamon rolls and chili, but it just works for me. Just don't ask me why.
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