The other night as I was making dinner, I pulled some carrots out to be chopped and peeled.
This is exactly how they came out of the bag. As I put them on my cutting board, I couldn't help but notice the striking differences between each one.
Do you think that the third carrot from the left was completely irritated and bummed that she ( yes, it was a she) was put in a bag with carrots like the first carrot on the left? I mean, the first carrot is much taller and thinner. Or do you think she was preoccupied with the fact that the two on the far right were best friends who constantly had their heads together and seemed to be engaged in a whispering frenzy? What were they saying? Were they talking about her?
She probably looked from left to right and thought, "Oh man! That carrot on the right has a much cooler fuzzy top than I do. And the carrot on the left is SO smooth, and has no dirt in her cracks (you know what I mean). It is like she has already been peeled!"
After assessing the situation she definitely didn't want to be in the same bag or on the same table with those other carrots. "What a rip-off!" she thinks, "They aren't even from the carrot patch I grew up in, and now I have to be in the same stew with them?!"
If the carrot really was focused on thoughts such as these, and she really did want to be some carrot other than herself, she missed the supremely important truth that she had the capability to nourish someone that day.
And she did.
She nourished my family.
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
~e.e. cummings, 1955
