Curmudgeon's Corner

What Would Our Biographies Look Like?

Posted by Al Campbell on May 14, 2012

Potpourri, Quality of Life, People Making A Difference

If someone were to decide to write a biography of your life, would it be a ‘tell all” or would it describe a person you’d have been proud to be thought of in that way?

In reality, we write autobiographies every day; we just don’t think of it in that manner, but it is an autobiography all its own.  Every day we interact with others in one or another ways, we create yet another page.  On a really good day, or even a really bad day, we could write an entire chapter.  It is probably better to write it only on a page-per-day basis.

Do you ever reflect, at the end of a day, on what you did during that day about which you wish you could have a ‘do over’.  Unfortunately, I do that reasonably often, and my reflections usually are concerning something I’d have done differently rather than something I’d make a note to repeat as often as possible.

I know this is our nature as humans but I wish I were better able to correct my flaws more quickly, before they threatened to cost me a friend or caused me to need to apologize to another.  I know that we are flawed creatures and that we have been since the day of our birth.  True, we might’ve been flawed persons in waiting until we learned how to speak and how to be angry and how to wish we had something that our brother or sister or friend had.  We had to have been born flawed, however, since we demonstrate that before we would have been able to learn that ‘art form’ from another.

As I ponder things such as this, I realize how important it is that we are capable of forgiving, and that others are also capable of forgiving.  Were that not the case, we’d run out of friends and companions quite quickly since we too often are offensive in some way to them all.

I realize how important it is that we not become so in love with self that we cannot admit our flawed character; that we cannot bring ourselves to make those apologies; that we cannot become just a little better each day at seeing those about-to-occur things in time to keep them from occurring.  I’ve gotten a bit better at that, but I ought to be a lot better at it than I am for all the years I’ve been alive.

All this reminds me of two things;

I am ever thankful for those who are willing to forgive me; and I am going to try to be mindful at the beginning of each day, that, with the help of my Lord, I will be better able to avoid the things that could make me need to apologize.

Unfortunately for some readers, this does not mean that this is my final blog…unless this is the day I write the last page of my autobiography.  If that were to be the case, how much better it would be if there was no need to fret over the apology I couldn’t make.