The Teacup Story

There was a couple who used to go to shop in the beautiful stores. They both liked antiques and pottery and especially teacups. One day in this beautiful shop they saw a beautiful teacup. They said, "May we see that? We've never seen one quite so beautiful." As the lady handed it to them, suddenly the teacup spoke.

"You don't understand," it said. "I haven't always been a teacup. There was a time when I was red and I was clay." My master took me and rolled me and patted me over and over and I yelled out, "let me alone", but he only smiled, "Not yet."

"Then I was placed on a spinning wheel," the teacup said, "and suddenly I was spun around and around and around. Stop it! I'm getting dizzy!" I screamed. But the master only nodded and said, 'Not yet."

Then he put me in the oven. I never felt such heat. I wondered why he wanted to burn me, and I yelled and knocked at the door. I could see him through the opening and I could read his lips as He shook his head, "Not yet."

Finally the door opened, he put me on the shelf, and I began to cool. "There, that's better," I said. And he brushed and painted me all over. The fumes were horrible. I thought I would gag. "Stop it, stop it!" I cried. He only nodded, "Not yet."

Then suddenly he put me back into the oven, not like the first one. This was twice as hot and I knew I would suffocate. I begged. I pleaded. I screamed. I cried. All the time I could see him through the opening nodding his head saying, "Not yet."

Then I knew there wasn't any hope. I would never make it. I was ready to give up. But the door opened and he took me out and placed me on the shelf. One hour later he handed me a mirror and said, "Look at yourself." And I did. I said, "That's not me; that couldn't be me. It's beautiful. I'm beautiful."

"I want you to remember," then, he said, "I know it hurts to be rolled and patted, but if I had left you alone, you'd have dried up. I know it made you dizzy to spin around on the wheel, but if I had stopped, you would have crumbled.
I knew it hurt and was hot and disagreeable in the oven, but if I hadn't put you there, you would have cracked. I know the fumes were bad when I brushed and painted you all over, but if I hadn't done that, you never would have hardened; you would not have had any color in your life.

And if I hadn't put you back in that second oven, you wouldn't survive for very long because the hardness would not have held. Now you are a finished product. You are what I had in mind when I first began with you."

********
God knows what He's doing (for all of us).He is the Potter, and we are His clay.

He will mold us and make us, So that we may be made into a flawless piece of work To fulfill His good, pleasing, and perfect will.

Thanks to Paul Chia for sharing

What Your Spouse Must Know about Investing By Christine Benz

Within every household, most couples divide and conquer.Maybe you do the laundry and your spouse always handles the trash. Or perhaps he's in control of all things yard-related, but you always do the grocery shopping.

Handling a household's financial affairs is another one of those tasks that usually falls to one spouse or the other. Of course, there are some couples who are equally engaged in the process of budgeting, bill-paying, saving, and investing. But in most families, those jobs are the exclusive domain of just one partner.

If you're trolling around Morningstar.com for information, there's a good chance that you're that person in your household. Perhaps you had hands-on work or educational experience with financial matters, or maybe you simply have a greater aptitude and interest in financial affairs than does your spouse.

The key risk you run in single-handedly managing your family's financial affairs, however, is that you could leave your spouse out of the loop. If something were to happen to you, would he or she know how to manage the family nest egg? And even if you expect that your spouse will have to turn to a financial advisor for help when you're gone, would he or she even know where to look for advice?

Even if you're fit as a fiddle, make sure that your spouse would know how to handle the following issues if something were to happen to you.

1. Whom to Contact

Your first step in leaving your spouse well prepared is to draw up a list of your important financial contacts: financial planners, insurance agents, accountants, and attorneys. Include their names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, and also provide a brief overview of what they've helped you with.

2. Where to Find Everything

After that, your next step is to delineate what assets you have and where to find them. Even if you're not an investment junkie, you're no doubt holding a number of different accounts scattered across several different financial-service providers. You may have it all straight in your head, but it could seem like a confusing mess to your spouse. Try to streamline your investment accounts as much as you possibly can. Your partner will have a far easier time managing the family nest egg if something should happen to you. Maintaining a relatively short list of investments has another positive side effect: You'll have fewer moving parts to monitor. It also lessens the chance that you'll wind up with a portfolio that behaves a lot like an index fund but costs a good deal more.

In addition to streamlining your portfolio, it also makes sense to develop a filing system that makes sense to both of you. Start by creating a folder--either paper or electronic--for each separate account, and be judicious about what papers you store in each. (Stash: Brokerage and mutual fund statements, along with trade confirmations. Trash: Annual reports, prospectuses, and marketing literature.) Once you've done that, create a master directory, listing all of your accounts and account numbers (don't forget life-insurance policies), the names and phone numbers of any individuals you deal with at various financial institutions, and any URLs and passwords you need to gain access to your accounts. Store this information in an ultrasafe place, such as a safety-deposit box or in a password-protected file on your computer, and let your spouse know that it's there.

For other ideas on handling your financial records, read this article about how to organize your financial life, and check out this column on what paperwork you can safely throw out and what you should keep. Also bookmark or print out this checklist for surviving spouses; consider using it as a guide as you prepare your master directory.

3. How You're Doing

Even if you don't inform your spouse of every investment decision you make, you should take time periodically to give him or her the big-picture view of where your finances stand. How much do you have overall, and how much of that is liquid (that is, in cash or in securities that you could easily convert to cash)? Are you on track to meet your shared goals or do you need to increase your savings rate? Deciding how much to spend each month and how much to save and invest is a basic decision for every household, and both partners should be involved.

4. Which Assets to Tap First

Some of your assets can be tapped at any time, while others may carry penalties and tax costs if your spouse withdraws the money prematurely. To prevent your spouse from making a serious and costly mistake, it pays to clearly delineate which of your assets are liquid and which are not. As a general rule of thumb, you'll want to keep at least six months' worth of living expenses in highly liquid securities, such as money market funds, CDs, or money market alternatives. If you're retired and drawing upon your portfolio for living expenses, aim for three years' worth of living expenses in highly liquid accounts.

5. Where to Go for Help

If you've been an investment do-it-yourselfer but expect that your spouse will have to seek outside help in managing your financial affairs after you've gone, it can't hurt to lay the groundwork for that possibility. Scout around for financial planners who share your investing philosophy and have served clients with needs similar to yours. For details on how to find a financial advisor who suits your needs, check out this article.

6. How to Learn More

Even if you expect that your spouse will use the services of a financial planner or advisor after you're gone, he or she will still need a basic grounding in money and investing. No, a financial book isn't beach reading, but a handful of commonsense investment books impart a lot of information in an easy-to-digest format. Here are a handful of Morningstar analysts' favorite books for those who are relatively new to investing.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/What-Your-Spouse-Must-Know-ms-537084665.html?x=0

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The Joy of Less By Pico Iyer

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.”  

The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later.

Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,”is just out in paperback.

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