authentic

i'm feeling badly because i teased my six year old nephew at lunch today and he made a sad frowny face. his kids meal at the restaurant came with three mini ice cream cones and he was upset because he didn't like his flavour. i commented "oh poor caleb... doesn't like his ice cream". i'm not one to tease cruelly so when i realized it came out that way i tried to back peddle. hopefully this has not left lasting damage on his psyche. i wondered where the comment came from, and realized it's largely tied to the emotions stirred by the book i'm currently reading – the help. it's basically about black women living & working in mississippi during the early 1960's. it's made me think a lot about how basic rights were denied to people because of the colour of their skin (this kind of behaviour still occurs today in different ways with different ethnicities). and while i don't want to be too hard on a six year old, it's not too difficult for me to see a connection to how being privileged can make us ungrateful. it's not enough to simply have ice cream, we complain that it's not good enough or the specific flavour we want. i'm awakening to this truth in my own life (I'M ungrateful, I'M privileged and desensitized) and unfortunately didn't exercise a filter in conversing with my young sweet-natured nephew. i imagine that gratitude is a difficult lesson to teach (i haven't the foggiest idea how one teaches true gratitude), just as having a privileged world-view is difficult to unlearn. good thing we're not expected to know all these things right away. phew!

where you invest your love, you invest your life.