Stories...Reflections cont.

We are supposed to grow up one day at a time; some of us do it one decade at a time, and without being able to study the 'master plan" or even seeing it... just like our oldest cathedrals, progressively, by decades or centuries with no blueprints or plans. This is like a child that invents the adult they will become, with the final design visible only at the end.
Don't look back to find where you are going, the answer is ahead of you. Treat your regrets, your memories, your pearls of wisdom the way you treat your old vacation photos; let them gather the dust they deserve. Be a precursor of who you will become later would have made good advise to follow. Stop describing yourself as the son or daughter of immigrants and try "I'm the future owner of a little bar or restaurant in Mexico or the Dominican Republic", both of which have Canadian retirees...You certainly do not need to be 'old' to move and change lifestyles.
But we prefer to start our accounts in the past tense with where parents or grandparents have come from, what they have done, and who they became. In old and primitive cultures, people used to rattle off long genealogies as a way to introduce themselves; today curiosity about where we come from still drives our sense of self. Then again, we may be looking for 'connections'...
All the great narratives of the world are always told in hindsight; people's legacies are told in terms of history; in terms of what people will or may remember after they are gone. When people should write their book or the symphony that could make them famous in the next decade or century, they write their obituary...
Get a head start on the future by projecting your intuition, five, twenty, or a hundred years from now. Look in the mirror and see yourself as the younger version of the person you wish to be at the age of 60 or 90.
Give children the respect due the adults they will become; think of your son or daughter-in-law not as simply the respective in-law, that married your son or daughter, but as the future grandparent of your great grandchildren.
Far too many of us adopt this one life narrative, and hold its truisms to be self evident...we assume that our awareness of sequences of events reflect chronological reality. They usually do not. According to many contemporary historians we, collectively, are what is referred to as "unreliable narrators" of our own biographies...subjective eyewitnesses who do not know all the facts about ourselves and thus cannot grasp the full scope of their meanings...Somehow we are 'clueless'
Shall continue this train of reflections later...the cats are getting upset and want their dinners...