An Insightful Short Story About Spilling Coffee — What’s In YOUR Cup?

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Excerpt: This short story about spilling coffee shares a powerful analogy that can help you better understand your temperament (and reactions) in life.

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You’re walking down the street holding a cup of coffee when someone bumps into you and causes it to spill. Why did you spill coffee?

You might say, “Because someone bumped into me!“

Wrong. It’s a trick question. You spilled coffee because coffee is what was in your cup.

Had there been tea in your cup, you would have spilled tea. Had there been water, you would have spilled water. Whatever it was that was in your cup is what would have spilled out.

It follows, then, that when life bumps into you (which it will), whatever is inside of you is what will spill out, too. It’s easy to fake what’s inside of your cup when your cup is balanced. Hard to stop your cup from spilling out its real contents once you’ve been bumped into.

Questions to consider: “What do you think is in your cup when it’s balanced?” “If you got bumped into, what do you think would spill over?”

Patience, understanding, compassion, humility? …Or impatience, anger, bitterness, and resentment?

Life provides the cup, YOU choose its contents.

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Source: Adapted from a post shared by Hector and Barbie Santos on FB

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Afterword: What’s In YOUR Cup?

Right, so how do we fill our cups with patience, understanding, compassion, humility, and whatever else we might think is good? The way I see it, we all start out with our cups filled with different amounts, types, and concentrations of liquids at birth—we all have a nature. And our cups get diluted, flavored, mixed, and further concentrated as a result of all of the experiences we go through and how we internalize them (nurture).

Once we understand this, then we can start to manage, rather than suffer from, the contents of our cups—our lives. The default approach being to let whatever the heck spill over that happens to spill over whenever the heck we happen to get bumped into. It’s the difference between ignorance and awareness. Between blindness and clarity. Between carelessness and responsibility. It’s a difference that takes what you always thought were inevitable reactions of your nature and allows you to change them—influence them—to be chosen responses based on how you’ve nurtured them.

Our nature is out of our control—what we get in our cup at birth is what we get in our cup at birth. But, once we accept what we’ve been given and take responsibility for what’s in our cup, then we can actually start to influence and change it how we’d like.

Let’s say you were born with black coffee in your cup at birth and you have a bitter and hot-tempered nature. How to manage bitterness? With sweetness, of course. You can add cream or sugar. In life, this might be kinder people, more positive environments, more uplifting messages and media, better models and mentors, etc. Adding more coffee grounds, however, is going to have the opposite effect—it’ll only add more bitterness. And so it is with hot-temperedness—mix in cool tempered liquids or ice. This might be people who have a ‘cool’ temperaments, or programing that can teach you how to ‘cool’ off, or better environments that surround you with calm behavior, etc.

On the other hand, let’s say you were born with orange soda in your cup at birth and you have an extra bubbly, excessively sweet, and easily excited nature. While these qualities sound much better than black coffee, it still might be important to balance these extremes to a more neutral temperament. Extra bubbly might lead to naiveté. Excessively sweet might lead to manipulation. Easily excited might lead to frequent disappointment. But, they also might not either. This is why it’s up to YOU to choose the contents of your cup and how much or how little you want of any one element or another.

The one element I think everyone should consider deeply, however, is water—one of the most important elements of our lives. Water will dilute any liquid. And with dilution comes clarity. And clarity in life is a life lived with awareness. And living in awareness, in my estimation, is the ultimate. How to add water to your cup? The best ways I can think of would be through meditation and/or writing. But, in general, it would be any activity that leads to more clarity. And that’s what’s so powerful about this whole analogy—add enough water (meditation/ writing) and it can bring any cup—filled with any liquid from birth—to balance and awareness.

The only obstacle to this, the one that stops most people from ever pouring water into their cups, is the practice itself. For as long as you hold out on pouring water into your cup is as long as you will carry on concentrating your natural elements from birth into it. And the more potent that solution becomes, the more drastic the reactions will be when you get bumped into. Neither extreme is ideal—it is balance that we should seek. Not completely passive, not ultra aggressive—but, respectfully assertive. And that, in my estimation, happens one drop of water into our cup at a time.

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