I think that one of the greatest challenges we face in life is being honest with ourselves.
We may be conscious of using some deception or attempts to influence the thoughts of other, but somehow we even go to great lengths to avoid the fact that we may be doing
the same to ourselves.
When my children were small, I always attempted to teach them what I believed would be helpful to them in their lives, although I may not have always realized that there was some variance between what I said and what I did. You may remember the old saw: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
One of the things I frequently would say to my girls whenever they complained that some rule or outcome or event “wasn’t fair”, was “Who ever told you that life was fair?”, or as an alternative I’d say “Fare is what you pay to the bus driver.”
Recently I’ve moved from being an active worker into the realm of the retired, and as such, have felt that my life should be much more relaxed and free from obligations imposed by the needs and desires of others.
My wife, however, decided to take up employment where she was on call, and could be called at a pre-dawn hour to work. On a couple of occasions I was awakened and asked to drive her to her place of employment, arising several hours before I would have otherwise.
On one of these times I found myself thinking: “This isn’t fair! Now that I’m retired, why should I have to ‘work’ too, just so my wife could work”?
Then, as I was searching for the answer to that question, I recalled what I had attempted to instil into my children … now I have to decide: Do I live by my own teachings, or do I decide that I’d been wrong all that time?
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