Advice as you grow

For Jono

Other bits

Dear Jono,

It is hard to know how to write this for you. I remember you only as I last saw you aged just four years old but I have no doubt that you will have changed in the time that has passed.

When you read this will you be only a little older or will you be a grown man?

I have no idea.

If I write to you as if to too young a child or as if to too old a man please forgive a broken hearted dad.

The hardest lesson of my life, son, is that life is not fair. It probably has never been fair and will never be fair. Sometimes we get what we do not deserve and sometimes we do not get what we deserve.

Sometimes we deserve for bad to happen and yet we get good. Sometimes we are deserving of payment and get nothing. On the whole for every disappointment there will be many moments when we did not get what we had earned and much to our relief.

This doesn't mean life is without meaning. Nor without return.

When we do something it is like planting a carrot top, like we did shortly before we were separated. You never saw the carrot top grow to the best part of a meter in length. I kept that old dead plant for a long time just in case I could show it to you. Sadly it was broken when I moved to a new home recently.

Life is like this. We do good things and bad and it is like planting a small seed (or carrot top). These things grow.

Sometimes we get to see and experience the harvest in this life. Sometimes others get to experience it.

When it is something good that we planted every one is the happier of the thing that grows from it but when we plant the bad you may be fortunate and the plant will dry and be crushed before it gets to you but it could easily come back to you as a much bigger bad than you planted.

In this life, son, try to grow a good garden.

Daddy Matt.

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