Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Jan 13, 2005
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Wishing
We all make wishes at some stages in our lives. We wish for our numbers to come up in the lottery, or that a certain event on our lives goes well. We wish our friends all the best and send them good wishes on their birthday or anniversary. It's a word than conjures up many hopes and dreams yet, at the same time, a wish can be the simplest of things.
Many of our wishes are for future or present events, yet there are times when we look back and wish that we had done things better in our pasts. 'I wish I had listened to my parents more often' seems a common one or a wish that we had spent more time with a long lost relative who played a far larger part in your upbringing than you thought at the time. The little saying they used to come out with, or the 'you wait and see it will happen to you' event that you never believed at the time either. Yet, sure enough, several years later those words come back to your memory and then you realise that what was said to you that day was, in fact, true.
These thoughts can and do come racing back into our minds at the most inopportune moments and can play a large part of your thoughts for the rest of that day. This can spark off a whole range of memories, bringing back even more old wishes you had even forgotten about. Sometimes, when I am doing a job around the house and it isn't going quite the way I would like, I feel tempted to leave it just about working. Then I can hear my Dad saying his old favourite; 'If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing it right'.
He had that one plus a lot more that he could come out with at any time; it's only when it's too late that we wish we had spent more time together and got to know them better.
Sometimes it's not even family members who have made you think of all those past wishes. It can be people who were an influence in your life at an important time; a close friend, with whom you have long since lost contact, or a teacher from your school who helped you out with a problem. Wishes from the past are just like the ones we make for the future. We can not make them happen and the words 'if only' seem to come into our minds when we think of our past wishes. There is something sad about these wishes as we know, deep inside, that they will never come true. Yet the thought of them haunts us like a friendly ghost who knows more about us than we would like.
We are brought up with fairy stories where the hero is granted three wishes. All, of course, come true and leave us feeling good with a happy ending. Then there are wishing wells where we are told that, if we throw in a coin and make a wish, it will come true. So there is a time in our lives when we do actually believe all these stories only to have our illusions shattered as we grow up, leaving sadness in our lives.
Sometimes we wish bad things to happen to other people in a fit of temper but would, no doubt, feel terrible if they, indeed, did happen. Wishes can vary from the smallest desire to the extent when they become replaced with prayer. So the next time you send someone all your best wishes, you are probably sending more than you thought.
