Valuable lessons are everywhere.

I was the first child of two people with negative blood types. Doctors didn’t know how to handle that yet and as expected only the first child survived. My younger brother and sister didn’t live long enough to make it home from the hospital. Lesson: I am alive by dumb luck, not superiority.

When I was growing up in Detroit my parents both had jobs. In the early public school years summer vacation was a problem. They solved it by taking me to mom’s parents in rural southern Indiana. From ages five through fourteen, from late June to the end of August, I had a completely different life . Tractors, farm animals, fishing, blackberry picking, swimming hole. Nothing like the city. A whole different point of view.
Lesson: We quickly adjust to where we are and who we are with.

My grandparents, Sam and Mae, never had much money. He did manual labor jobs when I was staying with them and they lived in cheap rented places out in the country. The first couple of years they had no indoor plumbing or electricity. A well with hand operated water pump in the yard, an outhouse in back and kerosene lante
s after dark. There was a goat we milked every day. Lesson: Complaints are useless. Action improves.
Social life was centered around church, family and neighbors. I never saw them smoke or drink alcohol. They had an old car which took Sam to work and us to town when necessary. My first experience driving a car was in that 1942 Hudson at age thirteen. I had only steered a tractor on the lap of the driver before that. Lesson: Doesn’t matter where you learn. Just that you do.
The attitude my grandparents brought with them from Scotland was that whatever happened was for a reason so accept it and move on. They taught me by example. Love and strength enough to keep trying through whatever life throws at you. Money is less important than character. A simple life has plenty of pleasures if you look for them. Lesson: An open mind is valuable.

They were usually smiling and nice but stood up and faced what they felt was wrong. They sometimes cried about things but then rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Sam was not good at business but great with people. He always wanted to be a Minister and finally went to college in his sixties to accomplish it. Lesson: If you’re still alive you can still progress.
They were popular in their assigned small rural churches but stayed the same people through everything. Sam and I had a snowball fight when he was in his late seventies. Sam was as practical and as down to earth as they come for eighty two years, and Mae for ninety two. Lesson: We are who we choose to be whether successful or not.

Was their religion necessary for them to be good people? No, but they loved it and it helped them cope. They believed it was based on friendly, peaceful principles that encouraged health, charity and good will. I was never aware of negative teachings from theirs or other religions. Only from individuals for their personal reasons. Lesson: Religions usually teach goodness, but people sometimes pervert the message.

Scientists studying the age of things tell us we have lived on a small planet in a vast ocean of them for a comparatively short time. Whatever damage we do to our little world may wipe us out but won’t affect other planets much. If humans all become fossils nature will move on without emotion. We can see that humans and this earth are a minuscule part of a huge picture. Lesson: There is much more out there than we now know. Our progress is just beginning.

So are we unimportant or does the way we conduct ourselves matter? This is the big lesson. Our conduct makes our own lives reasonable or not. It also affects what and who is around us. Individuals smart enough to work together nicely with others and nature have a good chance to build, prosper and improve their own lives. Greedy, aggressive, bigoted behavior has proven to be hard to sustain and usually fails.
Today is the same as when Sam and Mae were around. Regardless of our electronic gadgets, how we decide to act makes all the difference.