One might wonder what a bare green pepper plant has to do with the newly crowned US Open women’s champion.
I’ll start with the pepper plant. This little pepper plant has struggled to survive this summer in a Mississippi without any more rain than the nearest desert. The yellow wilted leaves appeared ready to give up. Three scrawny peppers hung from limp branches. Last week, we finally got a rain. Overnight, the plant stood up, turned green, and sent out energy to those little peppers. I could almost taste them in my future.
This morning as I began my walk, I passed my pepper plant that had obviously had a nighttime visit from a varmint. It was completely stripped except for a few bottom leaves with the three tiny peppers snipped off and discarded on the ground. Now, I love fresh green pepper, which is an entirely different vegetable to the cardboard variety that you buy in the grocery store. To say I was disappointed is putting it mildly, but then I thought of Coco Gauff.
I have loved watching her play in the US Open. I have loved her interviews even more. She has a lot of savvy for a nineteen-year-old and a lot of humility for someone who took home the big trophy. I was particularly impressed with her answer to a question about pressure.
“I think it's just putting my life into perspective. I realize in a way it's pressure, but it's not. There are people struggling to feed their families. There are people who don’t know where their next meal is gonna come from, people who have to pay their bills. That's real pressure, that's real hardship, that's real life.”
I’m going to take my lesson from Coco and hope I continue to remember it. I, too, know people dealing with real struggles of hunger, terminal illness, grief, and so much more. I need to put my little bare pepper plant in perspective and be grateful for those three teeny peppers that will give good flavor to my breakfast omelet.