Muhammad explains resilience through coffee beans in boiling water. Unlike carrots that soften or eggs that harden, coffee beans change the water itself. The lesson: be a coffee bean, a person who transforms their circumstances rather than being transformed by them.
If you close yourself off to people because of their differences, you're going to miss some of the most important lessons and some of the best friendships in this life. Because Muhammad. Yeah, true. Muhammad told me that day, he said, if I put a coffee bean in that same pot of boiling water we call prison, he said, now you got to change the name of that water to coffee. Because the coffee bean, west, the smallest of the three things, small like you, has the power to change the entire atmosphere inside that pot. Because the power is inside the coffee bean just like the powers inside of you. He said, everything else in life is changed by the water. In life. Carrots are changed by the water, eggs are changed by the water, but not a coffee bean. The coffee beans, the only thing that changes the water because it's the change agent. If you want to come back as someone your parents recognize, you got to be like that coffee bean. And in fact, the last words he ever says to me, summer of 2009, y', all, the prison bus is getting ready to pick me up. He has four words from me to the way out the door. He said, hey, west, be a coffee.
