Once upon a time, a beautiful young daughter, who was struggling with life, went to her mother and told her that life was miserable and hard for her. She complaint how much she was exhausted of fighting with daily problems and she didn’t know how to overcome life obstacles, and she wanted to give up. It seemed like never ending challenges.
The mother took the beautiful young daughter to the kitchen where she filled three pots with water and placed them on a high fire. In the first pot, she put a carrot, in the second one she put an egg and in the last one she put some ground coffee beans. Soon the pots came to boil.
After some time the mother turned down the burners, fished the carrot and the egg out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee out into a cup.
Turning to her beautiful young daughter, she asked, “Dear Daughter, tell me what you see?”
“A carrot, an egg and a coffee”, the Daughter quickly replied.
“Look closer, Dear”, said the mother.
Then the daughter touched the carrot and noted that it was soft now.
The mother then asked the daughter to take the egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, the daughter observed the hard-boiled egg.
Finally, the mother asked her daughter to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled, as she tasted its rich aroma but asked wandering, “What does it all mean, dear mother?”
The mother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity — the boiling water - but each reacted differently.
The carrot went in strong, hard and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it became soft.
The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior, but after sitting through the boiling water, its insides became hard.
The ground coffee beans were unique, however. After they were in the boiling water, they had changed the water and gave its incredible rich aroma.
"Which are you? Which one do you choose to be?" the mother asked her daughter.
"When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond in difficult and life challenging situations? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?"
***
Have you ever thought on that which one you are? How do you handle adversity in life? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?
Can you imagine a scenario where you are performing the carrot role? A carrot that seems strong at first, but with pain and adversity could become soft and loses its strength!?
Or
Can you imagine a scenario where you are performing the egg role? An egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat and becomes hard on the inside.
Or
Can you imagine a scenario where you are performing the coffee bean role? A coffee bean that changes the environment around itself? Do you have the skills to become a coffee bean?
Can you develop such skills and elevate yourself to another level?
We can admit that Life could be difficult and full of challenges. It can be harsh, stressful, pushing through, navigating new roads, striving for success and feel like a pot of boiling hot water. Life is very often challenging us and offering obstacles that can transform us and change our perspective or test who we truly are and who we can become.
It’s all that depend on us to discover and unleash the power within us; uplift our life skills, redesign our inner Universe and go through life obstacles.
It’s all that depend on us to change our outer world the way we desire and start living the egg or the coffee bean life.
We just have to decide which scenario to choose and which role to perform – the carrot, egg or coffee bean role?
We can admit that Life is full of millions of ups and downs. Important here is how we react to the situations, how deeply life challenges transform us and how resilient we are or we can become.
Can we master our resilience skills?
Resilience is our ability to adapt and overcome adversity, a drama, a tragedy or a significant stressful experience. Resilience is something that we have - an inner ability that we can develop or improve. We might discover that we are more resilient in some situations and less in others. But resilience won't prevent us from problems or uncomfortable feelings that we’re facing.
Resilience could teach us how to reframe life problems as issues, challenges or even opportunities. It could teach us how to cope with difficult situations and emotions quickly in a healthy way.
Because Life is about educating and uplifting ourselves, learning, finding wisdom, developing new life skills, adapting and re-designing our inner and outer world. We may start as a carrot or an egg but we can consciously choose to become a coffee bean, to develop and master new life skills and convert our life obstacles into great opportunities.
Think of the courage that it takes to start training ourselves to gain, develop or improve new life skills! We can admit that this is a real strength!
It’s definitely not an easy process. Developing new life skills and learning how to respond to our daily struggles takes time and efforts. Being aware of our thoughts, training our minds and being in control of our emotions, feelings and actions is very similar to body training. We can choose low impact training or high-intensity exercises. We can choose to do it daily or 2-3 times per week, or when we remember about that – it’s better than zero. It all depends on that what results we set to achieve and how quickly we want to get them.
The most important is our will to start acting! Why not TODAY!?!
Following this path we should never forget to:
Remind of our strengths;
Devote some time to do something enjoyable;
Create beautiful life moments with our loved ones;
Encourage ourselves... Because we can become a Coffee Bean!
Here is the Bulgarian version of this beautiful story with a powerful message:
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