Over the past few weeks, we found numerous funny and anecdotal stories that all convey an important message.
Life is for living and without laughter, what is life ?
So we took time out to play !
(No comments this time !)
A mother repeatedly called upstairs for her son to get up, get dressed and get ready for school. It was a familiar routine, especially at exam time.
“I feel sick.” said the voice from the bedroom.
“You are not sick. Get up and get ready.” called the mother, walking up the stairs and hovering outside the bedroom door.
“I hate school and I’m not going.” said the voice from the bedroom, “I’m always getting things wrong, making mistakes and getting told off. Nobody likes me, and I’ve got no friends. And we have too many tests and they are too confusing. It’s all just pointless, and I’m not going to school ever again.”
“I’m sorry, but you are going to school.” said the mother through the door, continuing encouragingly, “Really, mistakes are how we learn and develop. And please try not to take criticism so personally. And I can’t believe that nobody likes you - you have lots of friends at school. And yes, all those tests can be confusing, but we are all tested in many ways throughout our lives, so all of this experience at school is useful for life in general. Besides, you have to go, you are the headteacher.”
A school head was alerted by the caretaker to a persistent problem in the girls lavatories: some of the girl students were leaving lipstick kisses on the mirrors. The caretaker had left notices on the toilet walls asking for the practice to cease, but to no avail; every evening the caretaker would wipe away the kisses, and the next day lots more kisses would be planted on the mirror. It had become a bit of a game. The head teacher usually took a creative approach to problem solving, and so the next day she asked a few girl representatives from each class to meet with her in the lavatory.
“Thank you for coming.” said the head, “You will see there are several lipstick kisses in the mirrors in this washroom.”
Some of the girls grinned at each other.
“As you will understand, modern lipstick is cleverly designed to stay on the lips, and so the lipstick is not easy at all to clean from the mirrors. We have therefore had to develop a special cleaning regime, and my hope is that when you see the effort involved you will help spread the word that we’d all be better off if those responsible for the kisses use tissue paper instead of the mirrors in future.”
At this point the caretaker stepped forward with a sponge squeegee, which he took into one of the toilet cubicles, dipped into the toilet bowl, and then used to clean one of the lipstick-covered mirrors.
The caretaker smiled. The girls departed. And there were no more lipstick kisses on the mirrors.
A teacher told her young class to ask their parents for a family story with a moral at the end of it, and to return the next day to tell their stories.
In the classroom the next day, Joe gave his example first, “My dad is a farmer and we have chickens. One day we were taking lots of eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the truck when we hit a big bump in the road; the basket fell off the seat and all the eggs broke. The moral of the story is not to put all your eggs in one basket.”
“Very good.” said the teacher.
Next, Mary said, “We are farmers too. We had twenty eggs waiting to hatch, but when they did we only got ten chicks. The moral of this story is not to count your chickens before they’re hatched.”
“Very good.” said the teacher again, very pleased with the response so far.
Next it was Barney’s turn to tell his story : “My dad told me this story about my Aunt Karen. Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in the war and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whisky, a machine gun and a machete.”
“Go on.” said the teacher, intrigued.
“Aunt Karen drank the whisky on the way down to prepare herself; then she landed right in the middle of a hundred enemy soldiers. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete till the blade broke. And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands.”
“Good heavens.” said the horrified teacher, “What did your father say was the moral of that frightening story ?”
“Stay away from Aunt Karen when she’s been drinking !”
A small boy was walking along a beach at low tide, where countless thousands of small sea creatures, having been washed up, were stranded and doomed to perish. A man watched as the boy picked up individual creatures and took them back into the water.
“I can see you’re being very kind.” said the watching man, “But there must be a million of them; it can’t possibly make any difference.”
Returning from the water’s edge, the boy said, “It will for that one.”
A man found a cocoon for a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared, he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through the little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared stuck.
The man decided to help the butterfly and with a pair of scissors he cut open the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. Something was strange. The butterfly had a swollen body and shrivelled wings. The man watched the butterfly expecting it to take on its correct proportions. But nothing changed.
The butterfly stayed the same. It was never able to fly. In his kindness and haste the man did not realise that the butterfly’s struggle to get through the small opening of the cocoon is nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight.
Like the sapling which grows strong from being buffeted by the wind, in life we all need to struggle sometimes to make us strong.
When we coach and teach others it is helpful to recognize when people need to do things for themselves.
Fred and Mabel were both patients in a mental hospital. One day as they both walked beside the swimming pool, Mabel jumped into the deep end and sank to the bottom. Without a thought for his own safety, Fred jumped in after her, brought her to the surface, hauled her out, gave her the kiss of life and saved her.
The next day happened to be Fred’s annual review. He was brought before the hospital board, where the director told him, “Fred, I have some good news and some bad news : the good news is that in light of your heroic act yesterday we consider that you are sane and can be released from this home back into society. The bad news is, I’m afraid, that Mabel, the patient you saved, shortly afterwards hung herself in the bathroom with the belt from her bathrobe. I’m sorry but she’s dead.”
“She didn’t hang herself.” Fred replied, “I put her there to dry !”
