A beautiful-wise metaphor:

You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.

Why did you spill the coffee? "Because someone bumped into me!" Wrong answer.

You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup.

Had there been tea in the 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 gets tough, what spills over?

Joy, gratefulness, peace, and humility?

Anger, bitterness, harsh words, and reactions?

Life provides the cup. You choose how to fill it.

Today, let's work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation, kindness, gentleness, and love for others.

(many thanks to 🔥 for sharing! – attributed without evidence to Thich Nhat Hanh since at least 2018 [1]; cf How Great Thou Art (2005-03-16), This Is Water (2009-05-21), Core Buddhism (2011-10-17), Ground of Being (2013-10-03), Buddhism and Love (2017-01-09), Mantra - Be Meta, Be Open, Be Love (2018-11-11), Distilled to Pure Love (2019-01-04), ...) - ^z - 2021-08-02