RPF

December 2^nd, 2011

Welcome to another RPF, though I fear that it is slowly turning into Jim answers a random question that he either finds online or Jobro sends his way. However I feel that RPF is a better title than JAARQTHEFOOJSHW and besides it is still a random though that I have had however it just has a little bit more of a focus to it which is probably a good thing. To recap last week’s RPF I discussed what animal live the most boring life with my thinking leading me to the cow. I was kindly reminded by a few different individuals of the sloth which I honestly had thought of but due to the fact that I was writing that RPF on Thursday night as was really tired I simply did not feel like writing out that argument. I also glossed over the issue of whether an animal can even be bored or not, or if that is just a quality that us humans have the privilege of enjoying, as pointed out by Jobro (who seems to have nothing better to do with his life than read my RPFs and comment on them, which I love!). With that being said, this week’s RPF or JAARQTHEFOOJSHW (take your pick…) is based on the following question: If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be?

I figure that this is a good question to address since my host mother here in Honduras has recently had a newborn baby girl. Now obviously, this baby does not yet understand Spanish and for that matter for sure does not understand my Spanish but by the end of my two years here it is possible that my Spanish is passable and she will be able to understand me. So I need to start preparing what I am going to say to this child to ensure that they grow up to change the world, and if I do not quite think of the perfect thing to say to her I figure that I still have my own children that I can attempt to do better with. However my children are going to be completely brainwashed and be my Jim Jr’s similar to my previous experiment in which I turned Brigid into my mini me with resounding success as my friends and Jobro can attest to.

I wrote the previous two paragraphs Wednesday night and had intended to finish the rest up Thursday night. Well when I sat down to finish up, I still had not made my mind up of which one piece of advice I wanted to give to this newborn after all, that is a really tough question and a lot of responsibility. So I sat down and began to just free write all of my possible ideas until I had a fairly large paragraph of ideas. I went back and read over it and decided that I really could not make a decision on just one piece of advice since I really liked all of them. So, seeing as how it is my blog and I can make up whatever rules I want I decided that I was going to change the question to say “if you could give one paragraph of advice to a newborn, what would it be?” My answer follows below, sure there are multiple clichés involved in my answer and I am sure that I did not come up with the secret to life. I do not think there is one single secret to life, each person has their own secret of life that they need to figure out for themselves; and that is the real secret to life (See what I did there?). So below is the aforementioned paragraph of my advice, also if I absolutely was pressed for only one piece of advice I would offer up my first piece of advice, “Trust in God, He has a plan.”

Trust in God, He has a plan. Keep your childhood innocence in everything you do, miracles are all around you. Everyone has something to offer, you are not better than anyone. You can always keep learning from everyone and everything you do. Find your passion in life and pursue it with all of your energy. You can do anything that you set your mind to, all it takes is some positive thinking and creativity. You can change the world, for the better or the worse so be careful. Think before you speak. Take every opportunity that you can, let your curiosity lead you to discover more than you ever thought possible. Show compassion to everyone and everything, it is simply the right thing to do. Speaking of the right thing to do, do it always, even if it is not the popular or easy thing to do. Take the time to talk to people and learn their stories, you will learn more than you ever imagined by simply listening. Respect your elders; they have been through this all before and more. Keep everything in perspective, things can always be worse. Be thankful for everything that you have, it could be gone tomorrow. Do not take for granted your time on this planet because it will be over before you know it, therefore let nothing hold you back from the things you wish to accomplish. Set your goals high and once you reach them set even higher goals. Take your time to smell the flowers, literally. Enjoy the ride.