Above all else

So I was chatting with my 14-year-old son on the way back from church yesterday, and I don't know how it happened, but for some reason I decided to ask, "do you have any idea what kind of girl you want to marry one day?" To which he casually replied in the usual teenager's laconic manner, "just somebody nice I guess". Never knowing when to stop, I pressed on "yes, but what do you mean by nice?" And realising his Daddy is never going to let this go until he gets a good answer, the boy sighs briefly, and thinks for a bit.  D: Well, you know every guy wants to to be with someone who's hot, yet doesn't care very much about how she looks. Me: uh...ok, so like, somebody who's effortlessly hot. D: Yeah, exactly!  But also nice. Me (really never knowing when to stop): OK, but what about other stuff, like, does she have to like what you like, like computer games? D: Sigh.  Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.  * Of course * I want her to like ...

Last weekend, I went to visit one of my friends at her home to pass her a bunion gel-pad.  It's a small thing, but we'd noticed at our last monthly bread distribution that she had really bad bunions and we figured, worth a try, otherwise the bunions would just get worse.  But when I got there, neither she nor her kids were at home - only her husband.  I tried to explain to him how to use the bunion gel-pad, but he suggested that I explain it to my friend directly - he thought she would probably be at a nearby coffeeshop.  So off I went to the coffeeshop. At the first coffeeshop I bumped into K, a young ITE student who also lived in the same block.  He was buying a late dinner for himself, and we exchanged quick greetings and a pat on the back.  People sometimes think that students who don't study hard, or don't care enough, end up in ITE.  That's not really true, because K is not like that at all - he really cares about doing well, even a...

Someone told me recently about a "life exercise" in which one compiles all the stuff that makes up your life, and puts it in a pie chart.  So let's say for me, something like this. The idea is to visually demonstrate to myself that, in the event I lose one of these things, then I can see that, hey life is not so bad, that wasn't such a big deal.  Say for example, if I suffered a blown ACL, and couldn't run or play basketball any more, like this: At first blush - I'd say, hey, I still have my wife, children, parents, career, church life - so, chin up, things are not so bad.  Pretty good life visualisation tool to bring some optimism back into play! ... But what if, a month later, something happens at work, and boom, career gets sidetracked, I lose my job, or get put in cold storage somewhere, like this: Oops, now only half my life is left!  With only half of life's meaning left to me, what do I do? And what if something happens to...