In one of the beautiful cities located north of Holland, a daughter named Lucy complained to her father that her life was extremely miserable and she did not know how to change the shape of her life. Lucy said, “I am tired of fighting and struggling all the time. As soon as I solve one problem, another follows immediately.”
Her father, who worked as the head of cooks in one of the restaurants, took her inside the kitchen. There, he filled three pots with water and placed each on high fire. The three pots began to boil together at the same time. The father put potatoes in the first pot, an egg in the second pot, and ground coffee in the third pot.
He left them in the water to boil with the three ingredients in them. The father sat beside his daughter without uttering a word. The daughter leaned forward and waited impatiently for what would happen without asking her father what he was doing. After twenty minutes, the father turned off the fire, took out the potato from the first pot, and put it in another pot.
Then he took out the egg and put it in another pot, then took out the coffee and put it in a cup. Here, his father turned to her and asked, “What do you see, my daughter, in those three pots?” The girl answered in a hurry, “The potato, the egg, and the coffee.” Her father asked her to look at them closely and feel their texture. Indeed, the girl approached the three pots and began to feel what was in them.
She noticed that the potato was soft and suitable for eating easily, and the egg was also hard and solid, but as soon as it was peeled, it became ready to eat. As for the coffee, its aroma was rich, and its flavor made her smile when tasting it. When Lucy finished what she was doing, she asked her father what this meant and why he had boiled this food and made her taste it.
The father explained that the potato, the egg, and the coffee beans had all faced the same conditions—by which he meant the boiling water—and yet each one’s reaction was completely different. The potato, which was strong, hard, and ruthless, turned in the boiling water and became soft and weak. The egg, which was fragile and weak due to the thin outer shell that protects its inner liquid, when placed in the boiling water, became hard on the outside and soft on the inside, making it easy to eat.
The ground coffee beans were unique. After being exposed to the boiling water, they changed their color, affected it, and created something new. After the father finished explaining to his small daughter, he said to her, “Now tell me, my daughter, who are you among these? Are you the egg, the potato, or the coffee beans?”
The Moral Value Learned: When hardships knock on your door, choose one of the three types and be it. Either be hard, or soft, or flexible that adapts to them and influences them, and do not let them influence you. In life, many things and hardships happen to us.
But the only thing that really matters is how we choose the appropriate response to them and what we do in return. The pace of life is shaped by our reactions to what we face from it, and our ability to accept and transform all the conflicts we go through into something positive and beneficial.
The story is translated from: struggles of our life