An aging master grew tired of his apprentice complaining, and so, one morning, sent him for some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master instructed the unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it. ‘How does it taste?’, the master asked.
‘Bitter’, spit the apprentice.
The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake, and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said: ‘Now drink from the lake.’
As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked: ‘How does it taste?’ ‘Fresh’, remarked the apprentice. ‘Do you taste the salt?’, asked the master. ‘No’, said the young man.
At this, the master sat beside this serious young man who so reminded him of himself and took his hands, offering: ‘The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in.’
*When you are in pain, something you can try to do is to enlarge your sense of things. Stop being a glass and become more of a lake.
** Spend enough time thinking about your resources, the ‘what’s’ and the ‘who’s’ in your environment, that are making a difference now and that have made a difference in the past: what does that tell you about how they can be useful to you?
