A Cookie Jar

We love our sweets like none other. A family that is full of sweet tooth’s (barring me), there is always a question of- when to stop. My daughter had a beautiful cookie jar. A gorgeous white porcelain jar with a blue cover and a dainty looking animal hand painted in the front. How scrumptiously tasty right?

Well, everyday she got one cookie, either from her friends or their moms, or her grandparents, and so on… While she loved her cookies, she also knew her limits and kept filling up extra pieces of cookies in her lovely ‘cookie jar’. Now, some of her cookies were made of fond memories and others were bribes for doing something good or ‘as expected’. Whichever ones she did not like, went into her cookie jar.

As the days went by, her jar kept filling up and there came a time, there was no space remaining anymore for her to keep her precious cookies. By now, the ones below had gathered a mixed taste of all flavors that graced that cookie jar. They no longer retained their originality and were quite unpleasant to smell and taste.
What should she have done in this case? Eaten them, because they were hers and very expensive, or thrown them away in the dustbin because they were no longer edible?

All this while the new ones that she got did not have a place of their own and she was slowly getting a little flustered with this prospect. So one day, she tried reaching for the jar to check the contents, but unfortunately, as luck would have it, the jar came crashing down and all the cookies along with the jar broke.

Oh the poor soul, what a plight! She could not stop staring at the mess that had been created, but somewhere deep down, there was a sense of relief as well.

• She was no longer obliged to maintain that cookie jar.
• She could eat or choose not to eat a cookie anytime she wanted.
• She had the freedom to say NO to someone because she did not have a place to keep so many cookies.
• Lastly, she was much happier than she ever had been.

*********************************Bang Bang**************************************

Our lives are pretty much the same, don’t you think? We keep collecting sweet and not-so-sweet cookies in the form of appreciation, gratitude, anger, lust, worries, sadness, woes, guilt, lies, temptation, temper, love, and much much more.

Our mind is that ‘Cookie Jar’ that continuously processes these ‘Cookies’ that are presented to us in various forms, but we do not always know how to handle them. We end up filling out Mind and Heart with so many such cookies, that there comes a time where we completely break down and shatter.

This is where we need to learn to STOP and say NO.

• Do not fill your mind and heart with unnecessary banter that is not required for you to function normally.
• We often get lost in the rigmarole of societal life and pressure that we forget “WHO WE ARE”. It is time to take all those tasteless, spineless cookies out of the box, and throw them away.
• Knowing which cookies to let go off and which ones to keep, will HELP you sort your priorities better.
• Your first responsibility is towards yourself and that is a necessity to be fulfilled.
• Once your jar is full, we often have a tendency to pass that ‘Cookie’ to someone else and unknowingly, hurt them.
• Don’t let the jar fill up so much, so quickly… that it becomes unbearable to carry it.

Drop that COOKIE JAR, let it break, let go off all that burden and see your soul free away. It may not be a process that will happen overnight, but with time, you can focus your energy to remove those ‘sweet cookies’ away from your life.

A Cookie Jar of Sorts…