Beech Tree News Network

My sister has a cup with a broken handle that she keeps on her kitchen windowsill.  She drinks from it occasionally to remind herself of its message.  I use the cup as my coffee cup when I visit her.  The bold letters on the cup state simply: Attitude Is Everything.  We both appreciate the message of a cup whose handle remains on the windowsill while it is in use.  We understand the cup and its message because we are the cup.  Despite the pieces of us that are broken and scattered, we remain useful and will not abandon our function.  Attitude really is everything.

Occasionally, I catch an episode of Oprah’s “Super Soul Sunday.”  On one such Sunday, I heard the words, “If you want to change your life, change your story.”  The point the speaker was making is that everybody has a story they tell about their lives.  Our stories are explanations or justifications of who we are and why we are that way.  We don’t even have to tell the story to others for it to have an effect on our lives.  We can just keep repeating the story over and over to ourselves.  I was poor.  I was neglected.  I had a learning disability.  I wasn’t allowed to play sports.  My brothers got more attention than I did.  I didn’t get those Days-of-the-week underpants I wanted when I was twelve. 

The hardest life lesson I have had to learn is this: Adversity is my friend.  The best example I know to demonstrate this simple truth happened in Enterprise, Alabama, in the early part of the twentieth century.  The story involves a boll weevil, a cotton crop, and a whole lot of attitude.

The boll weevil arrived in the US from Mexico in the 1890s.  They devoured cotton crops across the south, eating their way through Alabama fields sometime in 1910.  Coffee County, Alabama, unlike the rest of the counties in the state, heeded the advice of agricultural scientists, like George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute, who encouraged farmers to diversify their crops to include peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans.  By 1917, Coffee County had rebounded economically with the largest peanut harvest in the nation.  In 1919, the city of Enterprise, in Coffee County, dedicated a statue of the boll weevil in the middle of Main Street.  The inscription at the base of the statue reads:  In profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the Herald of Prosperity.

The story of Enterprise, Alabama, could have gone either way.  When the people of Coffee County saw their cotton crops decimated, they had three choices: Give up; plant more cotton; plant something different, which would completely change their story. 

I’m not one to give up, but usually I do plant more cotton then watch in shock and sadness as the boll weevil devours it once again.  My goal is to reach a place that will enable me to build a monument to the boll weevil in my life and the prosperity that will follow in its wake if I am willing to change my story.  Now, if I could just let go of those Days-of-the-week underpants.