For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:

What is an important life lesson I have learned from my parents or other family members?

I used to joke that my youngest sister is probably the smartest of all of us, in part because she was able to look at all the bad examples from her older siblings and just make a point of not doing the stupid stuff that we did. Actually, she’s pretty smart and didn’t need our bad examples, but we provided them nonetheless. 

I’m a little stuck on the phrase, “important life lessons,” because as verbal as my family was I think the emphasis was on not what was said but on observing behavior. If anything I learned the importance of noticing the quality of unspoken strength of character, that anyone can say a thing, but watch how they treat others, that’s an important quality. The worse thing a person could be was a loud blowhard lacking the strength of character to do the right things. I know mom continually said, “Actions speak louder than Words,” but that was pretty much the extent of any life lessons. Oh yeah, she also made the seemingly heartless response when one of us would come to her with a scratched up knee or something, “Oh course it hurts, that means you’re still alive.” She was right, but that did little to comfort the hurt. We are odd creatures who can care so much but also fall short at weird times. There’s a life lesson.