Carrots, Eggs, and Hot Chocolate

Hello there, people!  This post was put on the Shaking Brains blog yesterday.  Don't forget to check it out there with all the other wonderful stuff on there! :D

      What do carrots, eggs, and hot chocolate have in common (besides being food)?  Let’s find out!

      We’ll do an experiment together.  We have three pots of boiling hot water.  We also have a carrot, an egg, and a packet of hot chocolate.

      Let’s put the carrot in the hot water.  At first, the carrot doesn’t seem to respond.  But after a while, if you look closely, you’ll see that it has expanded slightly and paled a little.  Then if you poke it with a fork, it will fall apart to the touch.  The carrot has given in to its circumstances, becoming soft and malleable.

      Now let’s put the egg in the next pot of water.  Watching it, you’ll notice little bubbles gathering around the shell, but no visible effect.  Even after you take the egg out of the water, the shell is still hard and the weight hasn’t seemed to change.  But crack the egg, and you’ll find that because of its situation, the egg has hardened.

      Now we’ll pour the hot chocolate powder into the last pot of hot water.  Give it a little stir.  Oooooh, can you smell that?  Delicious chocolate scents the air and wafts around the room.  In this case, you can’t take the chocolate out of the water to see what the water did to it.  You pour it into a cup and enjoy what the chocolate did to the water.

      How do we deal with our boiling water?  We are constantly surrounded by a world that tries to destroy us.  Are we like the carrot, who gives in and lets the circumstances take over, becoming soft and unable to defend itself?  Are we like the egg, who when confronted with adversity becomes hardened and unwilling to bend?  Or are we like the chocolate, who embraces the situation and turns it into something that improves everything involved?