Priorities

After loosing my father, and rather feeling dis-illusioned with life in general, one day by chance, I got to chat online with my long time good friend, Shankar, from Chennai. During the course of the discussion he mentioned the following story. It helped me kind of get things in perspective.

A professor once bought a tall glass jar to his class and asked the student how much space it had. The students said its totally empty. Then he started to put big stones into it. After a few stones, the jar couldnt take anymore. Now he asked how much space was left in the jar. The students said none as the jar was brim with the big stones. Then the professor pulled out some small pebbles from his pocket and dropped them into the jar. A few of them went and filled the gaps left between the big stones. Now he asked how much space was left. The students woke up and still said it was full and hence no space. Now the professor reached his other pocket and pulled out a bag of sand and poured it over the jar. The sand went and filled the space between the pebbles and the stones. Again the question and same answer. This time he reached down and grabbed a glass of water and poured it in the jar. The sand absorbed the water and he was able to pour the entire glass into the jar.

With this the professor looked at his students and said -

"Life is like the tall jar. The big stones stand for one's family. The pebbles represent one's job and hobbies if any. The sand represents one's indulgences. And finally the water, the luxury items in life. As we all just saw, after filling the jar with big stones, we still had space for the pebbles. After the still space for the sand and after that even for the water. But if we reverse the order and start filling the jar with water entirely, we wont have space for any of the other three. And so on.

Hence, even in our life, these things should come in that order - family first, job/hobbies next, followed by indulgences and then luxury. If so, we will be able to accommodate everything. If we dint get this priorities we will be missing big."

Many thanks to Shankar for the timely story - I hope to keep this my Stance in life in general.

Still:

A pano shot of the san diego downtown skyline from Coronado side. Computer stitched images from 6 shots taken with hand without tripod.