Watch Out for Pumpkins

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Copyright © 2009 Leonard Porcano


When I was about 5 years old, I grew a pumpkin. My mother was planting a garden, and I wanted to grow something too. I wanted to grow a pumpkin. Being both lazy and stubborn as a five year old, I decided that the best place to grow my pumpkin was in the loose gravel at the side of our driveway, I scooped out some gravel and poured the contents of my packet of pumpkin seeds into the hole, and then covered it with the gravel. I watered the gravel covered seeds with our garden hose, and went back to playing with my matchbox cars.

Each day, I dutifully checked on my pumpkin seeds to see how they were progressing. After a few weeks, some vines and leaves started to grow from the gravel. It was at this point that I started to realize I had a real knack for gardening. All the advice I had received with regards to where to plant and the kind of soil which was needed were clearly wrong.

One morning a few weeks later when I went to check on my plants, I spotted some orange between the leaves. As I pushed the leaves aside, I discovered a large pumpkin. It was a marvelous pumpkin, big and orange and perfect. I don't know how I had missed it up until this point. I dragged the pumpkin up to the house, where my mother was incredibly impressed. I did not rub it in too badly that I was right about where to plant my seeds, and that she was not.

Despite this incredible early success with gardening, I did not follow up with it at all over the next 16 years. I was now in my early twenties and married. I was a newlywed and my wife, Marie, was working on planting a garden. She was complaining that she was having trouble getting the plants to grow. Me being a gracious husband, and remembering my early gardening successes, I offered my help with the garden. When questioned about what qualified me to offer advice, I quickly offered up my story about the pumpkin. It was a story I had told a number of times, and one I was quite proud of. Well, Marie's response was not quite what I expected. Rather than jump at the chance to have a real green thumb help, she started to laugh. What's more, the more I assured her that I had indeed grown my pumpkin, the harder she laughed. I was not going to let this go, so I insisted that we would verify my story with my family that weekend. After all, they had all seen my pumpkin and even helped carve it into a jack o lantern.

The weekend came, and I could not wait to prove to my new bride that I had in fact grown this pumpkin. I ran the scenario through my head a number of times. I would of course be gracious when she would be forced to apologize for questioning me, my story, and my gardening skills. We had scarcely entered my mother's house when I brought up the story for her to confirm in front of Marie. My mother looked at my sister, and my sister back at my mother. Then my sister started laughing. I sensed that something was not right, when my mother dropped the bombshell on me.

You see, the vines and leaves which I dutifully watered and nurtured were simply weeds, which my mother did not have the heart to pull. As the weeds grew up, and I kept watering my mother began to feel bad that I would never get a pumpkin out of them. So one evening, she stopped at the market and picked up a pumpkin. While I was safely tucked into bed, she carefully placed the pumpkin between the weeds I had been watering. It was the next day, I discovered my accomplishment.

Now I do believe that every story and every experience has a silver lining. You can take something positive from everything if you look hard enough. In this case though, it would be another 10 years before I found the silver. I was having a hard time with someone I worked with. This person had some really backwards views about people different than him. It did not matter what kind of evidence or logic I provided, this guy was not letting go of these backwards views he had. It was obvious that he was wrong, but nothing I could say or do would break through to him. It was during one conversation with this guy, that it hit me. These backwards views he had been carrying since childhood, these views were his pumpkin. He was not holding a different opinion than me, he was holding a different reality. There was no way I would ever convince him that he had a faulty reality, so I stopped trying. And in accepting that his reality and mine were different, I was able to find a place where we were able to get along.

In fact our minds are incapable of experiencing a truly objective reality. Each of us has a concept of reality shaped by our experiences.

The first lesson I took from this is that we are responsible for our own pumpkins. Each of us has to take responsibility for reconciling our reality or our world view with those around us. You can not take it upon yourself to clear up somebody else's pumpkin, you can only take care of your own.

The second lesson is that everyone has pumpkins. We all have places within our reality that don't match up with those around us. Places where, good or bad, we experience the world differently. It is important to realize this and to be aware of these differences.

And finally, everyone includes you. So the next time you find yourself in a disagreement with someone realize that the thing that is coming between you may be a pumpkin, and what is more it may even be a pumpkin that you have been carrying and not them.


About the Author:
Leonard Porcano currently manages Novisi.com, a web development company. You can find Leonard's blog at Inspirinet.com. He loves to sail, and has raced sailboats and even spent a summer teaching sailing to the blind.