Category: Grandpa’s Way

Ten Ways to Tell that You’ve Had a Successful Summer Recess

Pen y Fan

You know you’ve had a successful summer recess when:

1. You spent less time in the emergency room this year than last year
2. Your house looks like Genghis Khan rode through
3. You have bright, shiny new graffiti on your walls
4. Your laundry is threatening to break out of the laundry room
5. You still can’t find where that smell is coming from
6. Your cupboards are bare
7. Your neighbours are still talking to you
8. You managed to put together an acceptable school uniform
9. You opened your last jar of coffee on the day they went back to school
10. And despite all that, all you can think about is going back to bed to catch up on some sleep!

Congratulations. You’re a survivor.

Real beauty isn’t skin deep

If you had to get a tattoo right now, what would it be and why?

If you had to get a tattoo, then you probably wouldn’t have a choice as to what it was.

But assuming that a choice was offered, I would choose to decline. I’ve never understood the desire for tattoos. They simply don’t make sense to me. Tattoos are just one more proof that real beauty isn’t skin deep.

Beauty is about what we are on the inside, the type of person we are, how we treat others, the quality of our character. Those qualities take inner work. They can’t be painted on, neither by cosmetics nor by ink.

Today is All I Need

If you could relive one day from your past, which day would it be and why?

Why relive a day in the past?

To enjoy the exquisite pleasure again? It wouldn’t be the same.

To correct a stupid mistake? How might that change the present? For better? Or for worse?

So many past experiences, good, bad, and indifferent, have made us what we are today. How would we be changed by reliving one day, especially if we changed something?  Would we be happier? Would we be sadder?

Were the good old days really that good? Were the bad old days really that bad? How might our present knowledge, shaped by our past, affect our experience of that day?

Did a bad experience change us for the better? Or a good experience change us for the worse? What might happen if we changed that experience?

Even if we simply visited the day and watched what happened as an observer, our experience of that day would be different from what it was at the time.

The past made us what we are today, for better or worse. If we changed something, it would affect us in unknown ways. If we left things alone, it would still change us in unknown ways.

Such is the time travel paradox. We can’t relive the past without changing our experience of it, and our memory of it.

No. Today is enough for me.