Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful and peace-filled holiday break, filled with love, joy, and a lot of relaxation!
It’s time to start back to The Good Eggs blog by exploring the virtue of Cooperation – a good way to start the new year!
Chapter Summary
In The Good Eggs, Chapter 5, we first learn about cooperation through compromise. The Eggs are trying to decide which play they want to perform at school. In her young wisdom, Seggourney said something very important. She said, “If we all cooperate, things will go smoothly.” At this point in the story, Seggourney was right and Ms. Poach admired the classes’ cooperation with one another. They decided on the play, “Jack and the Beanstalk.”
During rehearsal, something goes wrong and Peggy realizes she didn’t properly fasten the hooks on the beanstalk prop. Because of this negligence, Benedict fell from the beanstalk and could have been seriously hurt. Peggy didn’t do this on purpose; she was distracted by a family issue that was causing her a lot of turmoil. Once again, Seggourney comes up with a good idea and encourages Peggy to talk to her parents in order to encourage cooperation in their family, especially between her parents.
Starting With Me
“If we all cooperate, things will go smoothly.” Isn’t that the truth? We can imagine the truth of this statement on so many different levels. If leaders of countries would cooperate with one another there would be fewer, or better yet, no wars. If politicians would cooperate with one another, decisions would be made with the sole focus being on the good of society. The list goes on and on. Where could we possibly start to reverse what many times appears to be an uncooperative society?
As with all virtues, cooperation starts with “me.” One of the first steps we have to take is to examine our life and decide how well I live out the virtue. We have to ask ourselves the question: “Do I cooperate with others?”
As adults, this seems like a childish question. Didn’t we learn that stuff in kindergarten? Isn’t that one of the comments we look for on our child’s report cards? – “works well with others.” We already know how it works. We know how to cooperate with others, but knowledge of the virtue is only half the game. We also need to put it into practice, and we have to keep practicing it until it becomes a habit. From there we can move on to examine how well we cooperate with others in the workplace, in the community, when we volunteer, when we are part of a cause, when we are around our friends, and so on.
Try it out . . .
Spend some time this week being aware of how well you cooperate with others. Are you fairly good at it, or do you need some work? In what areas could you improve? You’re not alone – we all have room for improvement!
Happy cooperating - see you next week and thanks for being a Good Egg!
Wishing you all GOOD things,
Sandy
