Friday, October 23, 2015

Unintended life lessons

I often ask myself a question at the end of my day. “What did I learn today?”

Sometimes I can’t come up with anything of substance, but that’s because I haven’t been self-observant.

Yesterday I learned two things. One, that a dog’s ability to smell is one-hundred thousand times greater that the human olfactory system. That was an interesting fact from a PBS program.

The other thing I learned came from a story I read about a son having lunch with his aging and infirm father. It was one of those poignant and profound Facebook submissions.

The story tells about the fact that the father was spastic and spilled his food all over himself while seated at a local restaurant. The other patrons were either disgusted or sympathetic. The son ignored the stares and kindly looked after his father. After lunch, the son walked the father to the restroom and cleaned him up, gently straightened his clothes and calmly helped him walk out of the lunchroom.

At the door the father stopped and said loudly, “Did you leave anything behind?”

“No sir.” Replied the son.

“Yes, you did,” the father said as he turned to go out the door.”

“You left a lesson of how a son loves his father.”

The lesson, in this story, whether it’s true on not, is profound. The infirm and the elderly need consideration, compassion and comfort in social situations. For some their inability to function normally is a condition of age or disease, not desire. All of us, family, friends and even public observers need to be aware and realize we are all only a few years away from the same possibility.


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