Family Glue

Family Glue

‘- - - - - - and to my faithful servant Sarah who faithfully looked after the house and my wife and me, I bequeath the house. And to my butler I bequeath the Rolls Royce. Out of the cash in my estate, each shall have a million dollars to continue their lives in comfort. The rest of my estate shall be given to the charity selected by my solicitor. And finally, to my loser son who always bad-mouthed me and said I never gave him the time of day – It’s two o’clock.’

“And that concludes the reading of the will. Thank you all for coming. There are a few documents to sign and the estate will be distributed accordingly.”

Well, families. To tell the truth I never gave the subject a passing thought until this morning when I read a piece about families on facebook. And the subject kept growing so I started to think about it. The more I thought, the darker the cloud in my mind grew. So instead of thinking about things that could get personal, I decided to draw an analogy of the situation.

It’s a little bit like walking down the path of life’s journey and stepping on a piece of chewing gum. Even stopping to take off your shoe and scraping the gum off it doesn’t entirely do the job. There’s always that bit of residue there to stick to the pavement. It can ruin the whole trip if you let it. There’s all sorts of annoying little pebbles it picks up along the way. After a while it can get downright uncomfortable if you let it.

As usual, there’s a couple of choices you have in dealing with the problem. You can either just keep walking, slowly getting used to the lump under your foot until there’s no more room for additional pebbles, or you can keep stopping to scrape them off. Well, it’s not much of a choice when you figure that every time you clean your shoes you make room for more of these useless pebbles.

Keeping in mind what the real subject matter of this analogy is, there’s a certain satisfaction in thinking about continually stepping on these hangers-on and crushing them under the weight of your foot every time you take a step. Besides, after a while there’s no room left for additional pebbles. That’s got to be comforting.

Well let’s face it. There’s always bound to be some discomfort on the journey through life. Otherwise it would be a pretty dull adventure. And when the journey’s over, you don’t need your shoes anymore anyway so they just get tossed (along with whatever is stuck to them).

When I think about it, the journey of my life is far too important to me, with all its hopes and dreams, to worry about the odd pebble that sticks to the bottom of my shoe. As long as I keep this thought as I travel along, my mind will be on the goal (and I’ll have a little amusement along the way). At least that’s how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

 

Just sayin’.