Lessons From a Carrot, Egg, and Coffee Bean 584.1
Let’s face it. Personal trauma and tragedy – like illness or injury, death of a loved one, loss of a job, or an unexpected breakup of a relationship – are unavoidable. The question is: Will these private calamities erode our capacity to be happy or help us become stronger and better able to live a meaningful and fulfilling life?
Consider how differently carrots, eggs, and coffee beans are affected by the extreme adversity of being boiled.
Like the carrot, adversity can soften us. We can emerge more flexible, understanding, compassionate, and grateful or we can let our life spirit turn into a soft mush. Like the egg, the boiling water can make us harder, stronger, tougher, and wiser or we can become more cynical, pessimistic, callous, and inaccessible. And like the coffee bean, we can willingly transform our lives into something better or simply lose ourselves completely.
We can’t control what happens to us, but we have a lot to say about how we react and, therefore, what happens in us. The first step to turning adversity into advantage is to get out of the hot water as quickly as possible. Don’t dwell on catastrophe. Grieve, but move on. Don’t define your life by misfortune.
Second, force yourself to move forward. Draw on inner strengths, the people who love you, and your faith to help you transform your life into something better. Formulate a vision of a more purposeful life filled with people and experiences that will help you become more fulfilled.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
Comments
As always, Mr. Josephson, your commentary is excellent, and this one grabs me even more so because of recent news, your metaphors, the topic of overcoming hardships, and the importance of ethics which is the mainstay of your messages.
The use of food that is boiled as models for facing personal tragedy and hardship, however, seems a little too neat with your choices. How about lobster? As a writer of ethics, just how ethical is it to boil a creature alive that is sentient?
Another great essayist, David Foster Wallace, seems to have faced a personal hardship or some inner demons that he could not excise that led him to take his life recently. However, he did consider the lobster in regards to ethics in his essay for "Gourmet" (Aug 2004).
How ethical is it for us to force a hardship onto a sentient being that prefers to live, that with our brute force over it makes it impossible for them to overcome? Mr. Wallace addresses this along with the unpleasant task of boiling, and while we may not wish to think too deeply on our diet in regards to ethics, any person who takes ethics seriously should shine the spot light on it -- for not doing so is creating a dark corner out of bounds of scrutiny. The dark we all know is where the creep toward unethical behavior begins to take root.
Please take the time to read Mr. Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster."
http://www.lobsterlib.com/feat/davidwallace/page/lobsterarticle.pdf
While shorter than the work that has brought him fame (Infinite Jest), the essay meets the issue of ethics and food head on, hinting at some failure or perhaps complicity on his own part to defend the indefensible for pleasure.
Ethics, eh? Does a concrete boiling point for humans exist? I tend to think so, because if not, then moral relativism is a nasty alternative.
Posted by: Gregg | September 15, 2008 8:38 AM
Two of my college-age children, visiting from school, decided to make themselves a plush dinner late one Saturday night. They went to the store and purchased two baking potatoes, caesar salad, and two large live lobsters. Feeling pretty smug and hungry, they came home with their precious delicacies and went to work. They placed my large canning kettle on the stove, turned on the heat, and placed the two live lobsters in the pan to cook, as they prepared the rest of their meal.
As they were working, they kept hearing a clang, clang and didn't know where it was coming from. Finally, my son recognized that it was coming from the stove. Both my son and daughter looked over at the pan, There were four pinchers holding the pan lid up and trying to climb out of the hot pot.
They were immediately removed from the pot, carefully wrapped in a towel, and taken back to the grocery store. The manager wanted to give them back their money, but my two children didn't want their money. They just wanted to forget the whole experience. Since that day, my son and daughter have never eaten a lobster.
Posted by: Helen Creamer Bradford | September 18, 2008 11:02 PM
I believe you take your private calamities and use them to make you stronger, better, and wiser.
"You have to pound Iron before it becomes steel."
Posted by: Joe Zurolo | September 19, 2008 5:12 AM