❤️ Parable of the two crooked bricks

A story that will make you see yourself in a different way,

others and life in general. A story that will change and enrich you. A must read story!

After we bought the land for the monastery in 1983, we were penniless... We were poor monks who needed buildings. We couldn't afford to hire builders, the materials were expensive enough. So I had to learn to build…

Laying bricks looks easy: you slap mortar underneath,

then you lightly tap here and there. When I started building, I would tap one end to level the brick and then the other end would snap. When I tapped it, the brick moved. After I nudged it to level it, the front end snapped again. Try it and you'll know what I'm talking about.

As a monk, I had an enormous supply of patience and time.

I tried to get every brick perfectly laid, no matter what it cost me. When I finally finished my first brick wall, I stood back to admire it. And then I noticed – oh no! – I had bent two bricks. All the others were perfectly lined up, but these two were crooked. They looked terrible. They were destroying the whole wall. They were ruining her.

By this time, the cement mortar had already hardened

and I could not get the bricks out, so I begged the abbot to let me knock down the whole wall and start over—better yet blow it up straight away. I had slapped her and felt terribly awkward. The abbot was adamant: the wall remains.

❤️For this moment of energy, Milena recommends:

When showing the newly built monastery to the first visitors, I always tried to miss my brick wall. I didn't want anyone to see her at all. One day, three or four months after the completion, I was walking a visitor around and he saw her.

"Nice wall," he said casually.

"Sir," I replied in surprise, "didn't you forget your glasses in the car?" Or do you have vision problems? Don't you see those two crooked bricks that spoil the whole wall?
His answer completely changed my view of the wall, of myself, and of life in general.
"Yes, I see the two crooked bricks," he confirmed. – But I also see the other 998 flawless bricks.

I stood stunned.

For the first time in months I could see the other bricks apart from the two "wrong" ones. Above, below, to the left and to the right of them were all beautiful bricks, perfect bricks. Moreover, the perfect bricks were much, much more than the two that "stung" my eyes. Hitherto my gaze had remained fixed on my two faults—I was blind to everything else. That's why I didn't want to look at the wall, much less show it to others. That's why I wanted to destroy her. Now that I could see the even rows of bricks, the wall didn't look so bad - as the visitor had said, it was a "nice brick wall". Twenty years later, it's still there, and I've even forgotten exactly where those two crooked bricks are.

I literally cannot find where the errors are.

How many people end their relationship or get divorced because they only see the "two crooked bricks" in their partner? How many of us get depressed and even think about suicide because we only see in ourselves the "two bad bricks"? In fact, the good, perfect bricks are infinitely more - above, below, to the left and to the right of the weaknesses - but sometimes we don't notice them.

Instead, our gaze is always fixed on the mistakes.

And because we see only the defects, we stubbornly think that there is nothing else but them, and we want to destroy them. And unfortunately, sometimes we really destroy a "very nice wall".

We all have our two crooked bricks,

but the perfect bricks in us are immeasurably more than the "wrong" ones. When we look past them, things don't seem so bad anymore. Then we can not only live in peace with ourselves, without excluding our shortcomings, but also enjoy cohabitation with a partner. This is bad news for divorce lawyers, but good news for you.

I have told this incident many times.

Once a builder came to me and entrusted me with a professional secret.
- We, the builders, always make mistakes - he began - but we tell the clients that this is a "sign of originality" that none of the houses around have. After which we take a few thousand more from them!

So chances are your house's "unique features" were originally mistakes.