I burned my bagel in the toaster this morning, but I ate it anyway. “Waste not, want not” as my mother used to say. She was constantly tossing out snippets of received wisdom from the past, shaping her life by principles she never stopped to evaluate. “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Like Tigger, she bounced through her days with little self-reflection, driven to stay busy without knowing why, making up her mind and changing it again in a flash: “Don’t let the grass grow between your toes!” Her hands never stopped or paused. “Make hay while the sun shines,” she’d declare with gusto, and she pulled us into her vortex: “Many hands make light work.”
Introspection II by Helen Burgess
Whether or not we use ready proverbs to frame our worldview, it is still a cliche we’ve settled into, the unseen backdrop of our lives, relationships, and decisions… unless dissonance interrupts. So my introspective personality, as it found no footing in my family, was forced to forge itself a different path, but my mother’s frugality stuck fast to me, unnoticed, and it is very tenacious even now that I’ve spied it. It makes me scrimp, snap judge those my mother would consider wasteful, and economize to a silly extent. I don’t realize how it undermines other far more important values, robs my time and thoughts, and hurts my relationships. It seems we are all in the salvage business with a lifetime of self-discovery and recovery, of unlearning our many false or skewed or damaging assumptions. As a start, maybe I should toss my burnt toast.
Janathan Grace Reflections 
Toss it! It might be freeing…
Already ate it after scraping off the black. There’s always next time!
You could get a chicken, then you can toss it into the chicken bucket and get an egg in return!
wow, I thought somebody was commenting drunk! I thought, “OK, why would I get a chicken and throw it in a bucket? What is a “chicken bucket,” and how does it magically turn a chicken into an egg, and whose going to spend the time and money for a chicken in order to get one egg? My wife explained that it was the burnt toast that goes into the bucket, which holds food scraps used to feed chickens. Oh, that makes more sense. My wife is not in favor of owning chickens, however!