Talk to the Cook
My wife recently became discontent with our evening dinners. I would notice her plate as I finished eating my plate and her plate would be barely touched. I would ask her why she ate so little and she would respond, "It's just not good to me." I didn't get upset and tell her how many children were starving around the world, I just calmly asked her to send her complaints to the cook. There was only one problem with this answer. She was the cook. She would always have to laugh when she realized that she was the cook. I recently suggested that she take cooking lessons since she didn't like her own cooking and my cooking was even worse. I found a master chef who agreed to come into our home and teach her. After a few classes, I noticed her plate and it looked as though it had already gone through the dishwasher.
This was a lesson that we all need in some area of our life. Most areas of our lives could be better if we just did something about it. If you are not pleased with your knowledge, talk to the student; you are the student. If you are not pleased with your marriage, talk to the spouse, no not the other spouse, the spouse reading this. If you are not pleased with your spiritual life, talk to the seeker. If you are not pleased with your weight, talk to the eater. Sometimes we would rather talk to everyone except the only one who can really do something about a problem. Most times in our lives we are that someone. We can be our own best coach, our own best motivator, our own best challenger, if we would just tell ourselves the right things. Sometimes others don't believe in us because we don'tbelieve in ourselves. Next time something doesn't taste right in your life, try talking to the cook.
A Cup of Coffee
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 made of porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some ordinary looking, some expensive, some exquisite.
He told them to help themselves to hot coffee. When all the students had a cup of coffee in their hands, the professor said: “If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap looking 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 worse, you 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 folks, don’t let the cups drive you, enjoy the coffee instead.
Labels: muse
3 4:38 PM 4
Little Memories Of The Past
