Saturday, December 15, 2007

heyz, don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but I came across this story on yes 93.3 FM during the alevels, and I thought it was a good one. Hope my translation is an accurate one.
Once, there was an orphan who lived in an orphanage. Without any parents, day after day, he wondered to himself, what is the purpose of my life, with no one around to love and care for me? One day, he decided to ask the orphanage manager this question. "Sir, is there any meaning or value of this existence to my life?" The orphanage manager said nothing, and simply smiled to the boy, and walked away.
The next day, the orphanage manager picked up a stone from the orphanage garden, and gave it to the boy. He instructed the boy to sell the stone at the nearby market, but told him, "Let the people offer prices for the stone, but never sell it." So the boy went to the market to sell the stone. At first, nobody bothered about the boy, squatting at a corner of the marketplace, clutching to the stone. But after a while, a man walked up to the boy and asked him how much the boy would sell the stone for. Following the words of the orphanage manager, the boy refused to sell it. The man offered a price of$20 for the stone, but still the boy would not budge. He then began to offer higher and higher prices. This caught the attention of the nearby customers, who soon formed a crowd around the boy, offering higher and higher prices for the stone. At the end of the day, the boy went back to the orphanage and told the manager that the highest price offered to the boy for the stone that day was $800.
The next day, the orphanage manager told the boy to do the same thing at the central market of the town, which had a larger number of customers. The boy returned happily at the end of the day, telling the manager that the highest price offered this time around was $3000.
The next day, the manager told the boy to sell the stone at a fairly renowned auctioning fair, but with the same instructions as before. This time, the boy came back to the manager happily, saying that the highest bidder offered $50,000 for the stone.
Back at the orphanage, the orphanage manager took the orphan to a side, and told him, “this stone is just like who you are. If you choose to value it, it will be worth a lot. If you don’t, then it will just be another stone in the orphanage garden. How much value and meaning you give it, is how much your life is worth. No one other than yourself is able to determine what the value of your life means. It’s priceless, just like the stone in your hand.”
Yep! That’s the end of the story, but not the end of what the DJ had to say. She continued, in Chinese, to say literally that if one is unable to love oneself to a deep enough extent, he/she is unable to love someone else to that same deep extent. Sounded cheem to me man. Anyways, hope you all have a wonderful holidays. Hahaha=)
Feeling the blues? Just beat it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wAJ7w9G8-Q