Life is weird. Life is beautiful but weird. Or maybe it’s just, us, humans who are weird?! Or maybe it’s just me. No, that, I doubt, I’m pretty sure you are weird too!

Fool’s language included…

How many times must we take New Year’s resolutions that will be forgotten by the end of January?

How many times should we let shitty people treat us like shit, before we cross them of our life? How many times does it take for us to understand they don’t give a shit about us? In fact, we should understand they don’t give a shit about anything else but themselves. Why can’t we see and accept that?

How many times must we repeat the same mistakes to see that they lead to the same shitty result?

To be fair, when facing the same time of situation, we tend to do things slightly differently. We change one little thing or 2. The circumstances are always a little different too or at least they are to us. Maybe we just fail to realize they are the same. Maybe we just want to believe the situation is different and our reaction is different. Like with time travel movies, where there is a little twist in the way things are, we believe that this little difference will have a butterfly effect and the outcome will be completely different.

After a while, it just feels like we repeated the same mistake over and over. It feels like we failed to learn.

So how many times must we face the same shit to learn our lesson? 1, 2, 3, 7? I ask the question, but I don’t have an answer.

What I came to realize is that for certain matters, we will have a fixed set of chances to learn. When they are gone, they are gone. We might as well wait for our next life.

We can pretty much have as many jobs, partners, lovers and friends as we wish and we can fuck up all of those relationships and never learn from them. But there are relationships we can’t have multiple ones of and those are the relationships we have with our parents.

Yes I’m back on the topic of facing the death of my Mom! It’s going to be a theme for a while! Sorry.

So yeah, you & I can have as many jobs or lovers as you want. But apart from a few exceptions, most of us have only one dad and one mom. As a mom & dad, they might have had numerous children and therefore the opportunity to mess up one or more of their relationship with such offsprings. But you and I, as their offspring, we only have one chance to mess up or not our relationship with them.

We have a single opportunity to make our relationship with our mom, the best possible.

We have a single opportunity to make our relationship with our dad, the best possible.

Or fuck it up…

Yeah, we can blame them for anything and everything. But the truth is that it takes 2 to tango. And yes, it’s (hopefully) a long tango, more like a life marathon. We have years to work on such relationships, which will evolve as the parties evolve.

And I hear you thinking that each of the other individuals we interact with, lovers, friends etc. are unique as well.

Yes they are, but they are somehow interchangeable. Remember this lover you felt you could have died for a few years back? When are they now? Most likely out of your life. You probably mourned your relationship and it probably took some time to get over it, but you moved on. I know I did.

Remember that job you poured everything you had into? It was the most important thing in your life at the time. And then it ended and you mourned it and moved on. I know I did.

Those relationships had a significant impact on your life, they shaped you in more ways than you think or care to admit but they are now distant memories. They have been replaced by other relationships, hopefully better ones.

That’s why I say they are interchangeable.

Your parents? They are not. No one will ever take your mom or dad places. These are unique relationships which we usually take for granted and don’t cherish until it’s too late.

But wait!

There is another relationship that is absolutely unique. There is another relationship where you get a single chance, a life long chance but still a unique chance. Such relationship is the one you have with yourself.

You knew this all along. I guess I knew it all along as well. But do we truly behave daily as if we completely understood what this means? I know, I don’t. Do we really care about such relationship as much as we should? I know, I don’t.

This isn’t about being selfish or vain. On the contrary, it’s about caring about and cherishing the most incredible gift our parents have given us: life.

So how many times must I face the same shit to learn my lesson? God damn it, why does it have to be so hard to do the right thing? Maybe I’m just waiting for my next life to learn this lesson, like many others…

 

Wild flowers complementary of my Dad’s backyard!

And strawberries because, well… there are yummy!