AN ADAGE A DAY

Have you ever stopped to realize why all the adages you’ve heard your whole lifetime exist?  Because they’re true!  Somehow, the good and smart people before you, involved in similar circumstances, decided to forewarn you.  So they made up some clever and precise adages, which people toss around and some actually pay heed. 

My favorite is: no good deed goes unpunished.  That is so true.  When you do something for someone else, no matter what it is, if you have any expectation attached, you will feel “punished”, or perhaps let down at least by the outcome.  It’s usually the case that the other person or people never really know your agenda, nor your motives, so they rarely do things in the same manner or with the same desired outcome.   Sometimes too, it is as if the world is backhanding you when you attempt to do something right.  Perhaps it is the case that you are trying to do something for all the wrong reasons, those which garner you attention instead of doing it anonymously, as should be the way of doing gestures like that.  Or maybe, this adage is true because we are in some state of guilt over something we didn’t do well enough when doing what we are called to do in life, so a layer of bitterness forms over our giving hearts, which prevents us from feeling anything but guilty for our actions.  And finally, we may just find we are giving things, or of ourselves, to people who just don’t want what we are giving.  They either don’t feel the same, or they don’t want what we deemed so special a gift.  There could be a million different explanations, but the world seems to display a counter-balance for every action, so it seems logical that for the good deed will come the punishable aftermath.  

Another adage I enjoy is:  an apple a day keeps the doctor away.  Now this I am beginning to believe in earnest!  I have reached that time in my life when things go wrong just because.  There aren’t definitive moments of injury or illness I can note, just constant degradation of the “mechanism” which is me.  Something aches for no reason, this feels strange for a different day, that hurts when I do this or that . . . it makes no sense.  It’s called getting old and we all must do it with grace, hopefully.  I choose to fight against it, maybe this is the universe fighting back??  I was always so healthy and without injury when young, now I ache here, I moan there.  It’s a neverending story . . .this perceived battle between time and our bodies.  Aging gracefully might just mean not struggling so and letting all the feelings wash over us, changing what we can, accepting what we cannot change, and learning, as they say, to know full well the difference! 

No matter which adages are your favorites for whatever reasons, wisdom is what made them so.  Wisdom born of someone else’s aggravations, time, encounters, feelings, pain, and situational summarization, just so that you could say, “Gee, I’m not alone!”.