Life on Fast track - Coffee or Cup

It has just been one month since our BE exams finished, but the life thereafter has been boring and confusing enough to worry about the future! It has been really hard to say Good Bye to the friends who were together for four years and all those conversations, teasings, tauntings, parties, treats will surely haunt, at least until we get drenched in the undulation of the real world.

However one can't keep lamenting! Destiny takes everyone where one supposed to go. But the problem is, life is a teacher who teaches lessons by giving tests.

Learning from experiences is good; but learning from others' experiences is better. I want to share a mail I got from my friend SN, who told he received it from a Swamiji of Ramakrishna Mission. Although it is not exactly an experience, it does allow us to previse the bitter truth of life:

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 but normal for 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."

Don't let the cups drive you... Enjoy the coffee instead

I enjoyed and learnt something from the mail and I hope you did too.