Ok, I’m getting a little bored with ranting and complaining. Maybe I’ll take it up again tomorrow but, for now, how about a little inspirational stuff? Please contribute anything sappy and uplifting that you can think of. No contradicting, snarling or grumbling allowed.
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A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him. When class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks right to the top, rocks about 2" diameter.
He then asked the students if the jar was full.
They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The students laughed.
He asked his students again if the jar was full.
They agreed that yes, it was.
The professor then picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.
"Now," said the professor, "I want you to recognize that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - anything that is so important to you that if it were lost, you would be nearly destroyed.
The pebbles are the other things in life that matter, but on a smaller scale. The pebbles represent things like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff.
If you put the sand or the pebbles into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your energy and time on the small stuff, material things, you will never have room for the things that are truly most important.
The rest is just pebbles and sand.
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A story I picked up on another site:
There was a man who come to a fork in the road, one lead left, one lead right. So the man stopped, looked left and right. After a few minutes he sat down and thought more about where he should go. The minutes became hours, hours became days, days became weeks, weeks become years.
Then one day a second man came to the same fork in the road. He looked around and took the road to the right. The first man stopped him and said, "I sat at that fork for years and didn’t know where to go, then you came and made the choice so easily. How?"
The second man smiled and said, "It is my choice. Maybe I will regret it and maybe I won’t, but I didn’t want to spend my whole life sitting on the path wondering what could be. It was my choice and I will live with it."
My addition:
A year later the second man returned to the fork in the road, covered in scars. “Bad choice,” he explained, and then proceeded down the left road.
Two years later, the second man returned to the fork in the road, this time missing an arm. The two men sat together and sighed. Sometimes they talked.
“We can’t go back the way we came,” said the second man. The first acknowledged with a nod.
“But we can continue the way we came,” said the first man. “We were going the right way, and there was never a reason to turn away from it. ‘Conventional wisdom’ be damned.” So, together, they forged a new path, right down the middle.
11 Apr 2009, 10:02 pm
