Dependence

For as long as I can remember I have been a very independent person having a mind of my own my mother used to call it. This tendency has shown up in both of my children. From a very early age, my daughter dictated what she would wear and would not be happy with anything else so she often could be seen with a beautiful summer dress and wellington boots. My son will always come to a problem and see it in a completely different way from anybody else.

Being such never comes easily it frequently brought me into conflict with others especially teachers who found it easier to cope with a class if all were signing from the same hymn sheet. 

I have frequently made me question why I am such a person. How often I have found myself in a company and everybody else is enthusiastically chatting about a film or television programme that I have switched off or refused to watch.

I frequently rejoice in the fact that I still have around me friends who put up with my differences with a little grin or a word about how they would not have expected otherwise from me.

Of course, there have been times and I am sure there will be others when my independence has got me into trouble. An example I read somewhere was very familiar to me.

A sign read in a textile mill said, "When your thread becomes tangled, call the foreman." 

A young woman was new on the job. Her thread became tangled and she thought, "I'll just straighten this out myself." She tried, but the situation only worsened. Finally, she called the foreman. "I did the best I could," she said. "No, you didn't. To do the best, you should have called me that would have been the best you could have done."

While walking yesterday I travelled along a public footpath I had never walked before only to discover I was walking through wet and sticky mud that made walking very difficult and aggravated the pain I was already feeling in my foot.

Of course, my head was full of negative thoughts and I was wishing I had not chosen to take that turn off from what had been relatively simpler walking.

Then as I looked around me I saw so many things that showed me I was walking a path alongside very productive farmland and that in the summer this path would abound in wildflowers. I even passed a field on Highland cattle much to my delight.

I found myself taking out my little notebook and writing down the following. 

I am, despite any artistic pretensions, any sophistication and any accomplishments I may have still owed the fact of my existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains and the sun shines.

Now I may feel independent but in truth like all of us I am not. 

Have a great day.