I'm off.

Today I am going interstate for work for a week to train new staff.

Here are 2 things I am taking with me:

My "Keep Cup" - so I don't have to use paper cups when I get a takeaway coffee.

I like having the time to read when I travel! I am taking this new book.

I also write when I am on the plane. So I thought that today I would share something that I wrote while at an airport a year ago. There was an elderly man sitting near me at the cafe. He was the inspiration for this.

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1-3-09

"You're supposed to think before you open your mouth.

You're supposed to think before you open your bloody mouth.

Don't you know?

Did nobody teach you that you can't open your mouth

and say any stupid thing?"

He repeats this over and over.

He doesn't appear to have any companions.

He sits alone at the airport cafeteria drinking a coffee.

So I sit here and wonder.

Does he have Tourette's syndrome - is this a tic?

Or does he have dementia?

Were these spoken to him in his childhood by his mother or father or teacher perhaps?

I wonder if they would have spoken differently if they knew their words would bury themselves

so deeply in his brain that he'd spend the last years of his life repeating them.

Do you think he got the point?

_________

Hmmm I hope it doesn't seem depressing. I was just really impacted by the compulsiveness with which he repeated this phrase, and it made me sad that these words were the ones so planted in his brain. We can all have the power to encourage people and bring life to them with our words don't we?

Well I am off for the week. Ciao.