The contest in the garden

Currently for Toastmasters I'm working through a Story Telling unit. I gave a speech yesterday where I was suppose to make up a story which had a moral. This is what I gave:

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Would you please close your eyes? Imagine a tomato seed. They are small, maybe a forth of an inch long, and a tenth of an inch thin. One day a gardener opens up a package of tomato seeds. He puts one see in the dirt. Open your eyes for just a second, and then close them again.

Now picture a tomato seed in the dirt. It is dark, maybe a little cold. But it is wet. The seed feels the water and dirt and starts to grow. The roots grow down into the dirt, reaching deeper and deeper. The stem struggles up, pushing through the dirt. It is just a small thing, hardly bigger than a couple hairs. Finally it breaks through the dirt and is in the sunlight. Please open your eyes.

The tomato plant eagerly soaks up the sunlight. It continues to grow. It notices that there are other plants around it. It talks with a few of them. Some of them are weeds. Every so often the gardener comes through and pulls out many of the weeds. There are some corn plants, water melon plants, and pepper plants.

After a couple weedings the closest plant is a little corn stalk. Both the corn stalk and the tomato plant are just a couple inches tall.

The tomato plant asks the corn stalk, “What are you?” The corn stalk says “I’m a corn stalk. I’ll grow tall and produce a couple ears of corn.” The tomato plant is a little vain. It wants to be the tallest.

The tomato plant works hard to grow tall. The corn stalk grows straight up, but the tomato plan finds that it is blown back and forth with the wind. Luckily the tomato plant is able to lean on a metal structure the gardener puts around it.

Week after week the tomato plant tries to grow as tall as it can. Some days the corn stalk is taller, some days the tomato plant is taller. Weeks go back.

In the middle of the summer both the corn talk and the tomato plant are about five feet tall. Soon they are five and a half feet tall. The tomato plant digs deeper and deeper into the dirt. It reaches as high as it can. One day it is six feet tall. It looks like maybe the corn stalk has stopped growing. The tomato plant starts celebrating. “I’m going to win! I’m going to win.”

Then the gardener comes out. He prunes the tomato plant, heavily. He cuts off the top third of the tomato plant, and much of the side.

The tomato plant is despondent. Now the corn stalk is so much taller. Yet it doesn’t give up. It shoots up a couple branches and again reaches for the sun. A few weeks go by. It is almost up to the top of the corn stalk.

Then again the gardener comes out. The tomato plant is so angry. Why can’t the gardener just leave him alone? Clip, clip, clip, the top of the tomato plant is pruned back again.

Why! Why couldn’t the gardener just leave him alone?

The gardener comes out one day with a bushel. He plucks two ears off the corn stalk, and then turns to the tomato plant. “I know you wanted to be big and tall, taller than the corn stalk, but you are a tomato plant. Your job is to produce tomatoes. Because I pruned you back, you were able to produce dozens of big, juicy tomatoes. If you had put all your energy into being big, you won’t have been able to generate so many beautiful, sweet tasting tomatoes.”

With that the gardener filled the basket with dozens of tomatoes.

The moral of the story is we need to be careful about trying to do so much that we are not productive. We can be involved in so many activities that we miss doing the important things, like spending time with our family and friends.

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I found the hardest part was trying to come up with my own story with a moral, on demand. I kept thinking of all the other good stories I had read, or heard.


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