Alabama is in its worst drought in 50 years.  Triple digit temperatures, high humidity and no rain has conspired together to produce some miserable conditions for all who venture outdoors.  As I walk through the beautiful Birmingham Botanical Gardens I stop to chat with one on the men who are paid to keep things growing.  He recalls the 15 years he has been tending the plants of this garden and as he wipes his brow can not remember a more difficult time to be a gardener.

        As I turn to walk away I look down upon these white flowers and am stuck by how straight they are standing in the midday heat.  As I examine the bed of flowers I notice this one flower is standing taller than all the rest.  As I look closer to all the others bunched so tightly together they seem to be suffering from their overcrowded living conditions.  They seem to be choking each other as each one competes to establish their supremacy and get a foothold in the jam-packed soil below.  I imagine each flower living in the fear of the throng; each one craving the acceptance of the masses and dying from their conformity.

        I guess I have a lot in common with this poor bunch of flowers.  I too have knelt down before the altar of peer pressure.  I have spent so much time and effort seeking the acceptance of the crowd that I have almost lost my own identity.  I have felt the suffocating grasp of public opinion and endured the embarrassment of not fitting into the right group.  I have done things I am now ashamed of because I have craved the acceptance of the crowd so very much.  And like the overcrowded flowers I have starved myself of the really important things of life by my conformity.

        If we would but take a step back away from the crowd and look around, it would be easy to see how harmful their influences have been.  Oh, that we had the courage to walk the road less traveled; the vision to not blindly follow those who would squeeze us into their mold and daring to not only stand up and be counted, but to keep on standing even when we have to stand alone.  Let me be the first to tell you today that you are somebody special, be yourself!

Something to think about:

• Cultivate your own capabilities, your own style. Appreciate the members of your family for who they are, even though their outlook or style may be miles different from yours. Rabbits don’t fly. Eagles don’t swim. Ducks look funny trying to climb. Squirrels don’t have feathers. Stop comparing. There’s plenty of room in the forest.

• Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

• Every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is ever be put together a second time.

• How glorious it is—and also how painful—to be an exception.

• If I try to be like him, who will be like me?

• It is our uniqueness that gives freshness and vitality to a relationship.

• To be nobody but yourself—in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

• To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

Like everybody else, I am different
Rickey Moore