Life-​​changing Chocolate

A choco­late bar can change your life.

Yeah, you read right: a choco­late bar. And I don’t mean the way it changed MacGyver’s life when he was trapped in that room with the leaky vat of acid. That’s when he had noth­ing but his Swiss Army knife and a Hershey bar. Remember that one? The episode where he used choco­late to seal the leak because the chem­i­cal reac­tion with the metal sealed it tighter than any com­mer­cial polymer.

I really miss that show. But that’s not my point.

A choco­late bar can change your life because it equips you with a sim­ple set of rules:

1. Chocolate Tastes Good
2. Sharing Makes it Taste Better

I know there isn’t much to it; but it sure makes life eas­ier. Regardless of the fads of pop phi­los­o­phy, the older I get the more I truly begin to believe that I learned every­thing I need to know in kindergarten.

It really hit home for me when I was hav­ing a stress­ful day at work. I plopped down in my boss’s office to dis­cuss some soft­ware glitch or lay­out detail, I don’t remem­ber, to be hon­est. He was just open­ing a Hershey’s Special Dark bar.

“You like choco­late, right?” He said. And he handed me half the bar. We sat there and talked about the prob­lem as we enjoyed our choco­late. Like I said, I don’t remem­ber the con­ver­sa­tion now, but I sure do remem­ber the chocolate.

It’s the sim­ple plea­sures in life that really make the dif­fer­ence. I can live with­out prime rib, but I’d miss cheese­burg­ers hot off the grill. Truffles and petit-​​fors are okay, but I have trou­ble sleep­ing with­out my Fig Newtons before bed.

The list could go on. I’d rather wear my old Doc Martens than break in a new pair of shoes. T-​​shirts feel bet­ter than the starched for­mal­ity of col­lar and tie. And who doesn’t have an old pair of jeans they’d wear every day if they could? And there are some who do.

It doesn’t take heroic effort to make a dif­fer­ence in the world around us. Sharing really does make choco­late taste bet­ter; the sim­plest kind­nesses make life worth liv­ing. “Random acts of kind­ness and sense­less acts of beauty” is more than a catch phrase. Kindness is truth in it’s truest form; and, as the great poet John Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

I don’t want to live in an ugly world; and though some­times we humans revel and wal­low in the ugli­ness we bring upon our­selves, we are capa­ble of cre­at­ing a great deal of beauty too. In the end, cyn­i­cism and bit­ter­ness must sur­ren­der to the kind­ness of a stranger’s smile, an unex­pected help­ing hand at the gro­cery or a sur­prise offer to share a choco­late bar.