Personal Life Lessons

I meet strangers all the time, but they do not often stay strangers. Frequently they become friends. Even those people that I meet only once have an effect on my life. Sometimes I am fortunate to have two visits with particularly special people and in those brief moments I learn some of the greatest of my personal life lessons.

I know that as I touch them, they also touch me. I hope that my impact in their lives is wholly positive, but I am not naive enough to think that I only leave the memory of perfume and roses in my wake. However, I will continue to pray that my contribution to the lives of those I am in contact with will be primarily beneficial.

Years may pass before we realise the impact a particular person or event has had in our lives, or it can be instantaneous. Each life is important, each person we meet is as important as we are. We are constantly teachers – to ourselves and others, and students.

We have daily personal life lessons to learn and live.

“Every life is a contribution. We may not see how ... Everyone comes into our lives for a reason, and it is our responsibility to learn what they have to teach us.”

Six Feet Under s2,ep5

Embarrassing technology

Now before you get all excited, it’s probably not what you are thinking about! Good. Now that we’ve cleared that up, this is what happened to me the other day. It was embarrassing ...

As a recent owner of a Blackberry phone I was more than pleased that the company decided to give free applications following some downtime in their service. I browsed the gifts and selected ones I thought I could use. Strangely, because they were free they felt ‘different’ than if I had to pay for them, I don’t think I was quite as selective and careful with the instructions as I could have been.

Anyway, I had this particular application installed and after playing around with it for a while I promptly forgot it. This was my biggest error.

It just sat there on my phone waiting for the appropriate time to behave like a UXB. Well, that’s how I treated it later ...

I was sat with a year 3 child going through grammar and other literacy points when the phone made itself known from the depths of my coat pocket.

I scrambled to get it, the more flustered I became the harder it was to get the phone out, to remember where the controls were and to turn the volume down.

What happened? I hear you ask. Well, I had installed a Drive Safely application that reads your emails and messages to you as you are paying attention to the road. Alas, when I got out of the car that morning I had neglected to turn either the application or the phone on to silent.

The message that came through?

Well, I can’t really divulge that here, all I will say is that it was not suitable for the ears of a year 3 pupil! I mean, although they sometimes have difficulty in their reading skills, their listening and comprehension faculties work very well!

Her eyes were wide open as I eventually made the phone harmless.

I haven’t blushed like that for a while, but I guess hearing that my profile on some long forgotten site has be matched with  Anonymous Blond Curvaceous and that notifications have been sent is not conducive to a calm demeanour in front of sponge-like children!

Thanks for the free embarrassment Blackberry! 

Blogging and psychology

My once private thoughts are transferred by my fingertips to my blog. I work stuff out as I write it. My internal observations are transformed into words that somehow manage to convey the jumbled up bits and bytes that pulsated through my head some time ago.

After all this time I still do it. Why?

Well, blogging is airing my psychological laundry in public.

I get a buzz from seeing the metaphorical shirt-tails blowing to and fro on the waves of the web. Whether it is a stormy southwesterly or a cold northern breeze, it feels satisfying to put my thoughts on virtual paper.

Sometimes there is confusion raging in my head and when I talk about it, and sometimes write about it, it gains its own form of clarity and cleanness of being.

I blog because it’s my self-prescribed therapy ... and it’s still working!

Easy life

I have heard people say that others they know have such “an easy life”. This perception is, I think, flawed. I cannot think of a single person whose life is completely happy and they are able to handle all of life’s ups and downs without flinching.

I think that realism means accepting that life may not always be easy or a constant barrel of laughs, but it is always worth it.

I know people have looked at my life and commented that it is “easy”. I wish that was true.

I have daily challenges (you can read about some of them here in my blog) however, I do have a vast amount of joy and happiness as well. There are some situations where I could easily get morose and think along the “woe is me” lines, but I do, for the most part, resist and find a positive in whatever dire situation I am facing.

This philosophy has enabled me to remain upbeat most days.

There was a time when someone looked at me when I told them my age and said, “Well, you’ve obviously had an easy life!”

I just laughed in response.

All I know with total certainty every single day is that living my life is not always easy or fun, but it is always worth it.

Expectations confounded

Sometimes you get an opportunity to do things but it never turns out quite like you thought it would. You have great expectations and you are disappointed.

And other times when you have few - or no expectations - you are pleasantly surprised, so much so that, again, your expectations are confounded.

Life is full of surprises. How wonderful!

Lessons learnt

When starting with a presumption instead of a fact things could go wrong. This is my lesson learnt.

“Come here. I know you did this,” I called my son from the other room. I asserted my surety as I saw something incorrectly done when I entered the kitchen. This is a situation that I have repeatedly asked him to correct and I was not pleased to see that it was not done yet again.

His confused reaction was something I chose to ignore right then – I made another presumption. Morgan approached me meekly as I stood by the scene of his supposed crime. To be fair to him, although he didn’t seem to have any clue what I was talking about he still came when I summoned her.

As I started to lay out the fine details of this repeated offence we both heard another voice pipe up from the stairs, “It was me, Auntie Marjorie, I did it. Sorry.”

Immediate shame hit me.

In that second I learnt a lesson. The first thing I did was to apologise to Morgan for the false accusation, then I thanked and praised H for owning up without hesitation even though she was aware that I was not pleased with the situation I had found.

My other lesson learnt?

Unless I see the ‘crime’ being committed with my own eyes, then I need to ask first and don’t presume to know it all.

Starting anything with a wrong presumption will invariably lead to erroneous ‘facts’ that seem cast iron truth. With good fortune, in this situation, the truth came to light quickly and I was not hesitant in acknowledging my errors: lesson learnt.