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Hidden Treasures
The pastry may be 8/10, the cake 9/10 and the sandwich 5/10. But only one of them is waiting in front of us now.
If there is a sandwich in front of us, waiting to be eaten, we may remember a delicious braided pastry we had last week. Or our thoughts may wander into the future, anticipating the favourite cake ordered for the next celebration...
We tend to compare things as though they were side by side: pastry 8/10, cake 9/10, sandwich 5/10. But things in life are not always present and lined up beside one another. What use is the pastry that stayed in the past? Or what can I do with a cake that does not exist yet?
Let me score them again. The pastry’s sweet glaze: 8/10. The cake’s delicious filling: 9/10. The sandwich EXISTING HERE AND NOW: 50/10. At least! And I am not talking about how “we must learn to appreciate what we have”. I mean that having something at all IS its value! An enormous one! All the gold in the world pales beside it, because we do not have that gold.
We could remember the same thing when we want to change the people close to us. We all have some idea of an ideal version of a family member or another loved one, and we constantly want to “help” them become that “better” person. But this ideal version has one “tiny” flaw... THEY DO NOT EXIST! They live only in our heads. They are that “slice of cake in the future” — no matter how much icing we drizzle over it in our minds, it does not exist. Real people, however — exactly as they are, here and now — DO exist. And that is their enormous value.
Where we are in life right now simply cannot be compared with either our past or our future. One exists; the others do not. The present moment truly is everything we have — let us enjoy it!