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the parts and the whole

The tea shop in town has a pineapple carrot cake that I enjoy a piece of every couple of weeks. Today I got a piece on the way to the park with Ainsley so we could share a snack while we played off our excess energy for the day. When we took a break from testing every apparatus at the park to see if it was still the same as it was the day before, we bit into our treat and enjoyed the combination of flavors as the moist cake melted in our mouths. After a couple of bites Ainsley asked, “what’s in it?” Ainsley loves to help cook things and she has an insatiable curiosity so this question wasn’t exactly a surprise. The surprise came when after the first ingredient I listed (pineapple) her response was, “I don’t like pineapple.” I have never heard her say she didn’t like pineapple before, but the part that got me thinking was that she liked the cake despite of the things in it which by themselves she may not like. I don’t like walnuts, I don’t like eggs, and I am not really even all that fond of carrots, but I like the cake too and all of those things are in it. I could do without the walnuts, but otherwise it really is good.

The thought however was not about the food, my thought was about how often we can fail to appreciate something because we get distracted by the parts. Rarely do we find something that we can truly say we like every thing about it or them, but if we can focus on the whole, perhaps we can appreciate the parts which go into it. If you love someone that doesn’t mean that you like every little detail about them, but what you love is how everything about them comes together to make them who they are.
That part sounds great, but what happens when we use the same logic applied to other things (beyond love and food that is)? Is it the same concept as “the ends justify the means?” Are we supposed to appreciate or at least get past all the parts that go into a positive outcome because the outcome really is good? I guess that’s the problem when we take a metaphor about a piece of cake too far.
Reality is somewhere in between. The parts do matter, but so does the whole and sometimes we have to look at things both ways.

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