The exterior beauty is more precious when it covers the inner beauty.
The inner ugliness uglifies even the most beautiful face; the inner beauty enlightens and ennobles even the most imperfect features in such a way that they are not noticed anymore. Harmony, kindness, inner dignity, richness of ideas, the moral strength, the loving heart and the merry behavior, all these irradiate from the eyes, enliven the face, guide the movements, who will care then that the features are uneven or that the skin has an imperfect colour. Beauty does not warm the soul. The following parable says the same.
A young plowman went with his friends to a feast to choose his wife. So many beauties showed up for dance that the young man’s eyes ran to and fro.
The women walked like some pea hens, they waved and displayed their charms and only one of them stood shyly aside with her head bent to earth.
`That’s my soul mate` the ploughman said pointing towards her. I am used to judge as I do it with the ears of wheat: when they stand up proudly you can see them from afar but drawing closer you notice the wheat ear has no grains – while the full ear of wheat is always so bent that you don’t notice it from the first sight. It’s the same with the bride.
Once after ten years from the graduation of a famous university, the graduates visited the professor who had taught them psychology. They started a vivid talk and the hospitable host heard complaints about the many difficulties of life. Then he proposed to his visitors to drink some coffee and brought the kettle on a tray full of simple but also of very refined cups – from glass, porcelain and even from crystal…
After everyone took a cup the professor said: If you noticed the cups taken were the expensive ones. Nobody wanted to drink from the cheap cup. The source of your problems is the desire only what’s best. Understand this: the cup doesn’t make the coffee better or more flavored. Sometimes it is only more expensive and it hides what we drink in fact. You wanted coffee? See, your wish came true, but you willingly chose the best cups and began to look what cup each one of you had taken. Now think: life is like coffee and work, money, career, social position and all the other things you are concerned about are the cups: simple instruments of life. The cup we have doesn’t define our life and doesn’t change its value, but focusing on the cup we forget to enjoy the taste of the coffee.
As long as we focus on the exterior and less important things we fail to notice the qualities and the main attributes of the interior content which matters the most. Running after nice wrappings we lose the taste of true life.
Konstantin V. Zorin
