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things I learned today


swilkinson

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You are never too old to learn something new every day. I read that here as people come up with an improvement in their condition, find a new med, try a new treatment. People who try and fail have at least tried. The small number of people posting may just be because other members are still on that trial and error journey and maybe not ready to contribute yet.

 

We just had our grand daughter here for three days. Her parents went to the country, in the north east of our state, actually nearly as far away as I went two weeks ago, to scatter our daughter-in-law's father's ashes on one of his favourite spots. It was a three day weekend, one day up, one day there and a late return tonight to pick up their best girl. Tori and I spent the weekend making new discoveries. She has made leaps and bounds in maturity since she started school so she is much easier to entertain now, but oh! she is so busy. I was really tired by last night and there was still a day to go.

 

Today she went to church with us and then to Sunday school. She came bouncing back into church with the other children, mainly girls, clutching the picture she had made. Some of you will have seen it, it was her two footprints, sprinkled with glue and then sand, surrounding it were images of some of the things she saw as being important in her life. It is good that at so young an age the pictures were recognisable. Maybe we should all do one of those pictures, or maybe a word list, of all the things in our lives that are so important to us.

 

In church we did all the usual things you do in a service, the message was good but not memorable, but one line of a hymn stood out. It used the phrase "the fret of care". I thought that exactly described what I feel sometimes, as caring for Ray whittles away at me like a small saw blade I feel as if I am losing part of myself and will never get it back. But think of fret work, that lovely screening cut out of wood, developing the wood into a work of art, something finer than wood left plain. So the pressure of my carefilled life is developing me into something precious and worthwhile although at times I might feel as if my life is turning to sawdust what is left far more pleasing than I would have guessed.

 

Yesterday we helped paint the covered tables and barbecue areas at a park near the beach developed by our Lions Club over 25 years ago. It is part of a much larger parkland area some of which has reverted back to coastal scrub. Our local councils have some trouble with developing a coastal plan and sticking to it. I think too much money is spent on what would seem like refinements and don't turn out to be practical. The park we tackled has recently been refurbished so we were there to repaint the shelter sheds and covered barbecue areas and generally smarten the place up. Painting is not one of my major skills so I was only allowed to do the uprights and rails but I had fun. And the picnicing public will reap the benefit.

 

One of the topics of conversation was one that often crops up. Why, if we have over 40 members do we call a working bee and only six people turn out to help? I've heard this so many times. But looking at our Club I can see a lot of people who would have been in that same park years ago doing exactly what we were doing. They have just aged beyond doing the work now. There are some more recent members who have not found out what they want to do in the Club and so are not really fully involved yet. They might catch on and become fully involved or find nothing that interests them and move on, you never know with people, do you? And so painting in a park did not seem appealing enough to constitute service work for them yet. And some will be involved in a lot of other Club projects but not that particular project.

 

I sometimes spend time pondering all the new information I learn in a week. It takes time sometimes for me to see beyond mere words to the thoughts behind them. Tonight I watched a program on the "String Theory" which documented this abstract view of the universe. It told of the numerous scientists that laboured over many yeas to make a theory that fitted the need to join together a lot of scientific information to make some sense of our universe. I think each of us is working on our own particular "String Theory" to make sense of this life we live. We collect a lot of information, throw away the pieces that don't fit and in the end settle for some kind of acceptance of the reality of our lives. This is not always achieved in a smooth , straightforward way, we often struggle with those pieces that don't fit. Like with a complicated jigsaw puzzle there is a lot of ranting and raving as things that should fit, don't fit but in the end we do see some pattern in our lives. Hopefully it is a beautiful pattern and something worth keeping.

 

Whether it is in the struggle of survival or in the fret of caregiving I hope what you learned new this day was something worthwhile for your future happiness.

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