Photo: TheAramand

Sometimes in life, wisdom comes from the most unexpected places. The other day I learned a valuable life lesson from the finxins on a ham sandwich.

I was at Subway, an old favorite restaurant I hadn't been to in awhile. That didn't matter — I knew exactly what to order. A six-inch ham on wheat with everything except oil and vinegar is what I have every time. It's decisive and efficient to have a ready-made plan for the person making your sandwich. Micro-managing its construction at the veggie station is annoying, at best.

It wasn't until I bit into my ever-predictable order that I stopped to ponder my fixin decisions. I put vinegar on almost everything. Why should my Subway sandwich be any different?

Let me try to help you understand this: If vinegar were a street drug, Rufus would have to gather my friends and family for an intervention. Since my addiction is perfectly legal, he accepts my weird obsession and gives me fancy bottles of it for Christmas.

It goes along with my thing for pickles, this love of vinegar variety. I just counted twelve bottles in the pantry, which is necessary, because I like to pair my salad dressings with other parts of the meal. I don't know a thing about wine, unless it's been uncorked long enough to become vinegar. But my palate can distinguish skunked champagne, sherry or pinot grigio like a master sommelier.

Why, then, would I ask my Subway sandwich artist to hold the vinegar?

Hmmm....

Because I've always ordered that way. I wasn't a vinegar junkie until long after I'd been introduced to Subway sandwiches. My order was just a habit that hadn't evolved with my tastes.

This made me wonder....

What other aspects of my life I was approaching with such tunnel vision? The answer hit me like a bottle of balsamic to the head. I'm managing my job search the same way. See, I've been on the same career track for almost as long as I've been eating Subway sandwiches, so it's really hard for me to embrace the idea of radical change. In my head, pursuing something different is like throwing years of hard work away.

But what the wisdom of the ham sandwich fixins taught me is that different is not necessarily unknown. There are things on the menu I love. I'm just overlooking them, because I put the same ingredients into the search engine every day. Who knew a ham sandwich could affect positive change. From now on, I'm mixing up my fixin order, on sandwiches and more importantly, in life.