Good Mother Sheep

On a sunny day, the gardener fills up an empty pot. He carries the pot to his garden and draws water from it. He waters the plants with the water and soon the pot is emptied. He walks back to the hose – the source – and repeats his work. He has a very large garden to water. By the end of the day, he is exhausted.

A thunderstorm approaches, the gardener watches the rain fall. “What if I filled my pot with this rain water?” He pushed his empty pot out into the rain and to his surprise, it filled up to brim really quickly. He thought to himself, “If I brought the pot to my garden, I would save myself so much time and effort. I would not have to run to and fro, carrying the pot from one place to another.”

So he brought the pot into the garden, and he started to water his plants freely. The thunderstorm stopped before he finished his work, and he returned to his old ways of filling the pot. As he was about to fill it, he looked into the pot and realised there were stones in them. “If I remove them, they will make the pot lighter, and I will have more space to fill it with the water that I need.”

As he removed the stones, he realised there were even more things in the pot. Pebbles, sticks, leaves, and at the bottom of it all, a huge amount of sand. “Have I been carrying all these? How did I not think to look into the pot as I filled it up?” Day by day, he removed as many things as he could, until finally one day his pot was emptied.

As he anticipated the next thunderstorm, he felt ready. His pot will be filled with the most amount of water it could possibly fill. Watering the garden is going to be so much easier now.

But the biggest question for the gardener remained.

“I wonder how my pot could be filled all the time?”