Blog: Life is like a cup of coffee

“A cup of coffee shared with a friend is happiness tasted and time well spent” – Author unknown.

Visiting a friend and sharing a coffee, conversation exchanged soon became about life experiences, the hard knocks and the things causing stress. Offering a cup of coffee, my friend says quietly and calmly to me, “have you heard – life is like a cup of coffee”.

Everyone loves coffee I was thinking, so where’s this statement leading to? I’ve heard of many expectations and explanations of life in my day, but no one has related life to a cup of coffee to me before. I had to ask, “explain what you mean?”

My friend returned from the kitchen, with a pot of freshly made coffee and a handful of different coffee mugs, and then sat back down with me. He had grabbed enough coffee mugs for a group of people, but there was only the two of us having coffee. “Wow – where’s the party”, I said to him, with a chuckle and friendly smile? With a friendly smile returned, he said to me, “I will explain”.

Now these coffee mugs had me fixated with bewilderment. There were mugs of all types, polystyrene, plastic, crockery, ceramic, and glass. There were some very plain looking mugs, some elegant, some that looked quite expensive, and some exquisite.

Next my friend says to me, “I read something by an unknown author once, on the internet, that said “life is like a cup of coffee”, and it inspired me. I want to share this with you”.

Hmmm, I thought, maybe he thinks I am fussy about the cup I drink my coffee from. I’m really not .. I just love my coffee!

“Help yourself to a coffee cup and the coffee”, he said. After we both selected a coffee cup and were holding our coffee’s my friend said to me. “Notice what coffee mug we each selected, notice we are holding our coffee in a reasonably expensive cup leaving on the table the plainer and cheaper cups”.

“Hmmm, I thought – I wonder if he would have preferred that I had picked one of the disposable ones so there was no washing up?”

My friend then began to explain, “notice how we both picked only a quality coffee cup for ourselves, that is the source of most life problems and most stress. The cup adds no quality to the coffee no matter how different it is, but sometimes hides value and can even hide what we drink”.

“What you really wanted was to sit and enjoy a chat with me and a cup of coffee”. You didn’t ask me for a specific cup because you really didn’t want the cup, but when I produced a variety of mugs we both consciously picked the best cup to drink from for ourselves. And then we began to look at each other’s coffee cups making comparison about our choices”.

“I have learned to liken drinking coffee to that of life”, said my friend.

Life is like a cup of coffee, the jobs, our salary and position in society are the cups. The cups are our tools to hold and contain our “Life”. The type of cup we have, does not define nor change the quality of life we live unless we choose it.

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

Life is about enjoying your coffee and not necessarily the cup. The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything they have.

“So true my friend, so true”.

Enjoy your coffee my Starts at Sixty friends. Happy sharing a cuppa with you!