Life is a Coffee

I just love it when a story has a professor, who builds a concept and he comes up with a punchline. Anyway, lets read the story first.

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.

Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.  Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen  and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups -  porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some  expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to hot  coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said:  "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for each of you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other's cups.

Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn't change. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it."

So, don't let the cups drive you... enjoy the coffee instead...

I think the above is as true as it gets. We spend a lot of effort in trying to get the best container that life can be contained in. Where that is important too, it is the life itself that needs to improve in quality and that is where our major focus should be. If that is not so, which is usually the case, we feel discontent. We just can never sleep satisfied.

Even if we have the most expensive of containers and have  bad coffee in it, it just doesn't matter right. At the end of the day, I would have good coffee than have a good quality cup. Right?

But the fact of the matter is when I prepare for that good life, I want to get the best of everything that is around it but forget my focus that what I really wanted was just a good life and that's that.

I feel sometimes we spend too much effort in preparing for the good life than actually enjoying it.