Reflection on the POSITIVE Lessons From Childhood!

Goodness knows, we often spend a lot of time complaining about our families of origin, and how our parents raised us and what sort of "damage" they cause that resulted in our adult lives being needlessly difficult.

Of course, these are all just perceptions and I'd like to think that we eventually all grow to a point where we can recognize — with perhaps a few exceptions here and there — that our parents probably did the best they could with what they had available to them.

That's not saying that they were "good parents," it's simply saying they did the best they could, at the time. And let's keep in mind that that was their interpretation of what "the best" might be.

But I really don't want to focus on the blame game here! I'm far more interested in instead of looking backwards and finding those things for which I'm truly grateful that I learned during childhood and in my upbringing.

Without a doubt, the best thing I learned from my mother was a love of cooking. Although she was mostly a fairly "traditional" housewife when I was little, she was also a firm believer in the idea "I'm not going to send some useless and helpless man out into the world!"

And I am definitely very grateful for that!

She started me early. I was tasked with washing veggies from the garden, peeling apples and potatoes already when I was five or six, and I was actively involved in learning much of what went on in the kitchen from a practical perspective.

I was taught about ingredients, and about meal planning, and about how to "stretch" food and still make it taste good, for those lean times... something that really stood me in good stead!

Although my mother and I never really had a very close relationship, cooking and being in the kitchen together was one of the few areas in which we genuinely connected, and it was often what tied us together when I would go for family visits. We would plan meals together and then we would cook together and we had a really good time! And it was often a good enough time that we could lay aside our differences over so many other things in life that often kept us arguing.

From my dad, I learned how to truly look at things. Not just look at them on the surface, but really look at them to see how they came to be and how they worked and how they fit into life. It was something he taught me both in terms of looking at nature, and in terms of just looking at how things mechanical or otherwise actually work.

Over the years, I have often found myself being very grateful to him for my ability to look at something broken — even though I'm not an engineer, builder or electrician — and have an understanding for its fundamental function, often to such an extent I'm usually able to repair it.

I also owe my love of Nature and macrophotography largely to my dad because he was very interested in using the camera to "see things" that you could not see with the naked eye. I know he would have really have loved digital photography where you could take an extreme close up of a bug or a butterfly and immediately look at it and see the amazing detail that nature creates!

Of course, my parents are long gone now and they have both been dead for more than a decade, but I still find time to time take a moment to appreciate some of the things I've learned from them. I don't say that as a statement of forgiving their less admirable qualities, but merely as a reflection of the fact that you can't assume the entirety of a person is wrapped up in a few negative behaviors and traits.

It all serves as a valuable reminder that we can often find something good in some of life's more unfortunate situations!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Do you have any particular gratitude for lessons learned in childhood? Who taught you, and what are your best lessons? Did you vote for the new Steemit interface development? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

On A Different Note: Please Support @the-gorilla's DAO proposal to modernize the Steemit interface!

If you have not been here for a long time, you might not be aware that Steemit is largely community driven. That means many changes and updates aren't created by "some company or management," but by individual community members.

The "look and feel" of the Steemit interface has not changed significantly in the seven years I have been here, and it is terribly outdated. @the-gorilla is a professional developer who has proposed to create a "modernization." And for that to happen, he needs your vote, much in the same way we vote for Witnesses.

I encourage you to read the proposal and vote in support of it — it's the 2nd one down from the top! Every vote counts, little and large!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.02.07 00:25PST
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