WHICH ARE YOU; A CARROT, AN EGG OR COFFEE BEANS?

There are times in life when you just want to curl up in the fetal position and cry your eyes out. When you feel so broken, hurt, dismayed or even discouraged and you feel like you don’t just have the strength or desire to go on anymore. It may be that you got fired from your dream job; or you lost a loved one; or your partner whom you trusted cheated on you, whatever the case, everything sucks so bad that you don’t even see how things could get better.

This simple story might help. It illustrates the best way to handle adversity and how we can take those challenges, disappointments and overall crappy things that might happen to us, and use them to emerge a better version of ourselves.

A young woman was visiting with her grandmother one day and telling her how difficult her life was. She had discovered that her husband had cheated on her. ‘’Gran, I give up. I’m just not strong enough to fight anymore. Everything seems to be going wrong and when one problem is resolved, another one ten times worse happens. I swear I’m done.’’  Her grandmother looked at her, dried her tears, and brought her into the kitchen. There, the grandmother filled three pots with water and put them on the stove. When the pots started to boil, she placed carrots in the first pot, eggs in the second and ground coffee beans in the third.

The young woman and her grandmother didn’t say anything and just watched them boil. After about twenty minutes, the grandmother turned off the heat from under all the pots, and brought the contents of each out and put them in bowls. ‘’Tell me what you see,’’ the grandmother asked. ‘’Carrots, eggs and coffee,’’ the granddaughter replied thinking her grandmother’s mind wasn’t as sharp as it used to be. ‘’Feel the carrots,’’ the grandmother told her granddaughter. ‘’Then take an egg and break it, lastly, take a sip of the coffee.’’  The granddaughter did as she was told and then asked, ‘’What are you trying to tell me?’’

‘’You see honey, each of these objects faced the same adversity and each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the scalding water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile with only a thin shell protecting its liquid interior, but after sitting in boiling water, its inside had become hardened. The ground coffee beans were different than the other two – instead of being changed by the water, they had changed it.’’