Inspiration for blogs come from all sorts of places, the universe is great like that. There are lessons to learn and reminders everywhere - we just have to notice them. A couple of days ago, my friend Sally shared in a whatsapp group the below analogy. It resonated very strongly with me, so I thought I'd share it with you lovely people.
You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and
bumps into you or shakes your arm, making your spill your coffee everywhere. Why did you spill the cofee?
"Because someone bumped into me!!!"
Wrong answer.
You spilled the coffee beacuse there was coffee in your cup. Had there been tea in your cup, you would have spilled tea.
*whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out*
Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It's easy to fake it, until you get rattled.
*So we have to ask ourselves... "what's in my cup?"*
When life get tough, what spills over?
Joy, gratefulness, peace and humility?
Anger, bitternness, harsh words and reactions?
Life provides the cup, YOU choose how to fill it.
Isn't that a wonderful analogy?? I just loved the simplicity but depth it has to it.
There are a 3 things I want to pull out of this analogy for you to comtemplate:
1. Your sub-conscious will win out
When times are good, it's very easy to fake the person we are. To exhibit the personality traits that we believe suit the situation, or the person we want to be. It is only when the chips are down, or the coffee is spilt, that with all that extra stress the facade falls away and our truest nature shines through. Or in terms of many of the blogs i've written, when things are good you're operating from your conscious brain, but under stress our sub-sconscious takes over as we operate from auto-pilot. This reiterates the importance of doing the work to understand what your patterns and beliefs are, and if they are not in line with the person you want to be or supportive of the life you want to lead, we can do the work to alter them. You can read more about that in my 2 blogs about this: Power of the sub-conscious and Training the sub-conscious.
2. We often spill ourselves.
In this anology somone knocks you, but often we knock ourselves. Putting ourselves under undue pressure, or setting expectations for ourselves that far outweight those we have for others. This means that we can spill our own coffee far too easily. So we need to learn to be kinder to ourselves, to understand all the external stress before we chose to apply more internally.
Not to say that challenging ourselves isn't a worthwhile exercise or a very valuable growth tool, the key is to understand your limits and to be proportional in when and how we do it. You can read more about this in my Resilience is King and Modern Stress blogs.
3. The Choice is ours
What I found truly inspirational about the analogy is that it clearly positions us as being in control, and that means we have choices. Having options and the power to chose is immense, and something that we have to be conginsant of and take accountability for.
But wow, that means anything and everything is possible. We can chose to put out into the world whatever we want - joy, happiness, anger, resentment, love. black or white, positive or negative. It's quite a responsibility isn't it? With clearness of thought and intention, coupled with the work to get our sub-conscious aligned we can live in that choice in all aspects of our live all the time, whether we are knocked or not...
As my favourite quote says:
"You must make the choice, to take the chance, if you want anything in life to change."
That is kinda cool.. No?
So, today let's work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation and kindess, gentleness and love for others. That's a world i've love to live in, and where i'll happily spill my cup...
Until next time...
