Friday, September 4, 2009

Life is how you see it

This was a mail i recieved from a friend of mine, felt this one to be worth sharing among people so posting it on my page.

"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. Some times, 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.

1 comment:

swag said...

It's an old, cute yarn. Unfortunately, it's premise is false. Research -- such as through the Journal of Consumer Research -- has shown that the choice of a cup does, literally, affect a person's sensory enjoyment of coffee:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1299662/study_touch_does_affect_flavor/index.html

Which kind of deflates the entire point of the thing.