Kendra's Favorite Things

A friend from work was telling me a story the other day and it got me to thinking about how our tolerance for pain, love, life changes, and everything in between gets bigger as we experience more life.  It brought me back to times throughout my life when I had a feeling such as "I'll never love this much again" and never being able to listen to anyone who tried to console me or assure me that the feeling would ultimately go away.

I was recently getting dropped off to the airport and saw a young high school or college couple embracing as they were saying their spring break goodbyes. The pain they were both feeling was so evident and it looked as if they had been crying all day with the doom of saying goodbye looming over them. I remember thinking to myself "it's all gonna be fine... someday you'll really know what heartbreak feels like." 

But as I grabbed my bag and walked passed them it dawned on me that that's all the love and heartbreak they know through this point in their lives, and how insensitive of me to discount what they are going through.

The story my friend was telling me was one that her favorite teacher in high school told her many years ago. He used a cup for the analogy and spoke to the fact that when we are young, our cups are quite small so they get filled up quickly with emotions of love, pain, joy or anything else that comes our way. All we can physically handle is what will fit into our cup. As we grow older our cup grows, so our ability to process and handle life grows with it. Our ability to love grows deeper along with our threshold for pain. As we move through the many cups of our lives they begin to overflow, which simply means that we’ve outgrown our cup and must move on to a larger version so we can love even deeper and expose ourselves to the greater risks that are associated with that.

This spoke to me in so many ways, but the most important thing I took away from it is this; what can we all do to be more compassionate towards each other and the size of each other’s cups? If we show compassion and understanding to each other through difficult times eventually everyone’s cups will grow even larger and our ability to really LIVE and love will grow even deeper. How nice would a world be where everyone was allowing each other and themselves to grow into the big gulps they are meant to handle? 

I am thankful for my life and the variety of cups I've been lucky enough to experience throughout it. While each growth period may be associated with a certain amount of pain and suffering each one has given me a wonderful opportunity to grow even deeper in love both for myself and for others, and that has been the greatest gift of all!