What should every generation know or experience is the question I want to answer.
With each passing decade, more things should be added to the Essential Things Every Person Should Know list, so it's kind of tricky to even begin. However, in life there are quintessential essentials (if that's not too redundant).
I'll take a stab at this list, and then I hope you might add some essentials of your own.
With each passing decade, more things should be added to the Essential Things Every Person Should Know list, so it's kind of tricky to even begin. However, in life there are quintessential essentials (if that's not too redundant).
I'll take a stab at this list, and then I hope you might add some essentials of your own.
- Be grateful for food.
- Cultivate compassion.
- Work at a part-time job in service or retail, mow lawns or babysit, but get out there and do some hard work.
- Visit the graves of your ancestors. This would require you to know who and where they are. Find them.
- Read a poem of your choosing.
- Write at least one poem.
- Eat Chinese food in Chinatown in your nearest big city.
- Go on a 2,000-mile+ road trip at least once.
- Slow read the Book of Isaiah for comprehension. Take a class if you need to.
- Play hopscotch drawn with chalk on the sidewalk.
- Being cool is not the end goal.
- Family is everything. Don't throw them under the bus for your friends.
- If you have one truly good friend, that is enough. Friendship is about quality not quantity.
- Get outside more.
- Exercise and play and travel while you still can.
- Find yourself—not who you think you are but who you are meant to become—and become that.
The second one and the last one would make the top of my list together with "family is everything." To the hopscotch I would add swinging. Maybe "keep a journal" makes the list? I enjoyed reading your slice and thinking along.
ReplyDeleteI agree that everyone should have a job in service or retail at some time in their lives. For me, it was Montgomery Wards when I was in high school, and the cafeteria when I was in college.
ReplyDeleteAnd lots of babysitting along the way. I love your whole list, but especially the "family is everything," and "one truly good friend." I just finished You Go First and it makes me think of how each main character has a new friend by the end of the book. I would add travel to a place you've always longed to visit. For me, that was Paris!
Being cool is definitely not everything.
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