enjoy the coffee

Forwarded from my Uncle Jeff:

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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 the coffee.

After 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 you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself, adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases the kind of cup just makes the coffee more expensive and even hides what we drink.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups, and then began eyeing each other's cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee, and the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the types of cups we have do not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cups, we fail to enjoy the coffee.