Carrots, eggs and coffee
One day a young woman went to see her mother. When she got there, she told her mother how hard things had been in her life lately. The young woman was filled with anxiety and self-doubt and told her mother she did not know how she was going to go on. She was tired of the struggle. She was tired of fighting. She was ready to give up.
The young woman said that it seemed that just as she got one problem solved, another arose in its place, and she just couldn’t take it anymore.
The woman’s mother took her into the kitchen. There she filled three pots with water and turned the heat on high. Soon the pots were boiling. In the first pot, the mother placed some carrots. In the second, she placed eggs and, in the last, some ground coffee beans.
She let the pots boil without saying a word. After 20 minutes she turned off the burners. Then she fished the carrots out and put them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl as well, and she ladled the coffee into a cup. Next she turned to her daughter and said, “Tell me what you see.”
“Carrots, eggs and coffee,” the young woman replied. After the substances had cooled a bit the mother brought her daughter closer and asked her to feel the carrots. The young woman did and noted that they were soft. Then the mother asked her to break one of the eggs. The young woman broke and peeled an egg and looked at the hard-boiled contents. Last, the mother asked her daughter to taste the coffee. The daughter smiled as she tasted the coffee’s rich flavor.
“What does it mean, mother?” she asked.
The mother said, “Each of these three foods faced the same adversity—the boiling water—but each reacted differently to the experience. The carrot went in strong, hard and unrelenting. But after boiling became soft and weak. The egg had been fragile, easily breakable. But after boiling its inside had become hardened. The coffee beans, however, had reacted to the adversity by changing into something better—richer.
“Which are you?” the mother asked her daughter. “When adversity knocks, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean? Will you lose your strength like the carrot? Will you harden your heart like the egg? Or will you change because of the very circumstances that have caused you pain like the coffee beans?”
—Author Unknown
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