For the Other Roy

I visited with an acquaintance yesterday I've known for all the years since returning to the Land of the Round Door Knobs. We're not friends and we don't work together. We move in shared circles with each of us knowing about a half dozen people who know the other. I hold him in genuine affection, perhaps because I see him on such an infrequent basis. In my case, if absence makes the heart grow fonder it would help explain why people want me to leave; so they can start to miss me.

Roy offered a story yesterday that I hope you've never heard, or you'll need to find something else to read for the next two minutes, though it is so wonderful that even if you have heard it, you might enjoy it again. A college professor placed a large glass jar on a work bench and as his entire class watched, filled the jar with two pound rocks, filling the jar to the top. He then asked them if the jar was full and the class agreed it was. He opened a bag of pebbles and poured them down over the rocks in the jar and watched as they worked their way into all the spaces between the rocks and then he asked his class again if the jar was full. Again, they said 'yes'.

He reached under his table and pulled out a large chest, filled with sand and poured the sand atop the pebbles and the large rocks at a steady rate of speed and slowly the sand covered all the pebbles and rocks, finding and filling the smallest openings all the way to the top of the jar. He asked his students if they believed the jar was really full this time and after some hesitation they decided that it was.

He turned his back to them long enough to reach into his knapsack and pull out two cans of beer and opening both, he poured them over the sand that covered the pebbles and the rocks that filled the jar and waited until the foam had settled. Looking up he asked the students what it all meant, and the room was silent.

He quietly explained the glass jar was a person's life. The large rocks were the most important things in your life such as your family, your friends, your loved ones. They were the 'quality' in your quality of life without which there would be no point in living. He added the pebbles were important, but NOT the most important, things in your life, such as your car, your home, your job or where you shopped. And the sand, he added was the useless but pretty filler that so many of us confuse with the truly important things we most need.

The trick, said the Professor was not to fill up your jar but to know with what to fill it, noting that the jar could be completely filled with sand, leaving no room for anything else, and certainly none of what was really important. The same, he noted, could be said about filling your life with nice to have pebbles instead of need to have rocks. After you've filled the jar with pebbles you'll never have enough room for all the rocks you treasure. Always, he said, fill your life with that which is most important to you, enjoying as much of it as you have and never regret the absence of what you do not.

And the beer, asked one of the students. What is the purpose of the beer? That, smiled the professor is to illustrate that no matter how large or small your life is, there's always room for beer. And with that, the class bell rang and the students were dismissed.

Great story, Roy-one I'll never tell you as well as you, but I hope someone with a jar they're starting to fill happens by today and reads these words and remembers to leave room for the rocks and the beer. This is from my second favorite Roy, and that rhymes with joy.

-bill kenny