Pre School end. End of a segment

So at the end of June my littlest girl graduated... from pre school.  She spent three years there.  Before  that her older sister spent three years there.  It was 6 straight years, they are three years apart.  The point of this post is to say that you cant dwell and remember every day of the past, things keep going forward.. sort of.  But there is something about the ending of each segment of life which gets us to reminiscing and, well, dwelling on the past.

The pre school was so nice.  The kids were doing such nice arts and crafts which stopped when my older girl entered grade school.   It was really nice that our daughters brought home these really creative pictures of collages and trees with leaves and multiple things made out of toilet paper cardboard rolls, of which we saved our own to give to the pre school, and just lots of nice pictures and crafts.

Exhibition of Art from my 5 year old daughter,
Future Jackson Pollack

Granted by grade school the kids have to start on the "three Rs" and there are other classes that
become priority, but it seems they could include a regular arts class.  But, silly me, I don't know how the money situation of schools is today and whether they have had to cut out all that "extraneous" stuff.  In my day, we had music class twice a week and physical exercise twice a week. We had art class even till the higher grades.  Did all this stuff get cut?  Budget problems?  Although I struggled through Art class, because I am not very artistic, I remember Mrs. Highfield as a very energetic Arts teacher who seemed to love to teach us, even us little snot nose brats.  

Both my wife and I were teary eyed as we went on the last day of June to give 6 teachers small presents.  Six years, end of an era. Pre school is in the past.  A kind of open age when they are not restricted and time was not of the essence.  From hence on there is always some sort of perimeters, fences or "guidelines" predicting their arrow of study.  It is all so much more CONstricted now.  Well whatever, I guess for better or worse.

I tend to dwell on the past.

Recently a post was written on the "Unfit Father" here, one of my blogs I recommend and have on the side bar of my posts, in which he criticizes those who tell you basically to pay attention to every day of life with your kids.  I agree with him for the most part.  I think if you paid attention to every day of your life, you would go crazy.  I wrote a journal for a good ten years starting from a pre teen. I think I can go back to any day I wrote in those journals and remember that day.  I used to write my dreams down.  I had clear dreams every night (still do) and I wrote them daily.  I could go back and re read them and remember at least 80 per cent of them as if they had been a part of my memory bank.

You really dont want a lobotomy

But I think if a human had the capability to remember from recall (and not from writings or pictures) every day of his or her life they would either commit suicide after a while from the boredom of the memories or become lobotomized vegetables.

Lets face it, most of our lives are pretty much similar day to day and not much out of the ordinary happens.  Sure we come home from work in the evening and our spouse asks, "Hi honey how was your day" and your answer, "well it was quite interesting, I had a meeting, I wrote some interesting paragraphs and I talked to some interesting people who I have never met before and oh, I realized someone has been peeing in the public drinking fountain"  "Oh wow, that is a busy interesting day, wow, strange, great, interesting!"  But really it wasn't. It was just like most days at work, wherever you work.  I can only think that the president of the United States of America has a different day every day, all the rest of us, even other leaders and Senators and politicians and even firefighters and police people mostly have the same day at work, day after day.

Don't get me wrong, I love my work and find it interesting and still fun after twenty years (even though it doesn't pay the bills), but day to day, if I recounted a week at my job to you hour by hour, you would feel as if I had been performing lobotomization on you.  I have a couple high points in some of my days in which I sell some good music and talk to some interesting people.  That accounts for about 30 minutes of my day at the most.

The point being is, do you really want to remember every day and be aware of the whole time with your kids?  Not only can you not do that, but I don't think you really would want to.

We remember the special times, the big events, or even the events we want to remember.  By writing this blog I put in words certain events I want to remember in the growth of my kids and the passing of our lives together.  Writing this blog is kind of a once a month (I swear I am trying to get it to twice a month and even weekly like others and how it used to be) adult journal.  These events propel our lives and are stored in our memory and that is enough.

Really if you lived your life where you had to do something "special" every day, something "memorable" you would only live to be twenty.  It would be like taking cocaine or speed every day of your life. Except for William Burroughs and Keith Richards, we know how long drug addicts can live if they take hard drugs every day.

Thus, if we hear someone say, "I`ve lived a full life", it really means they have had enough special and memorable memories that was equivalent to 30 minutes of a day, whatever percentage of your life that works out to be (the equation would be .5 of 24 hours = x of 80 years, go figure).

So when you sit back at the end of each segment of your kids growth, you don't have to recall every day (even if you could do that, do you really want to do that?  As I have said two times already, I think that would drive you to suicide when you realized how boring your life was).  Don't remember the bad times, push them out of your head and make the past a nice rosy place it was meant to be.

And then enjoy your summer and get ready for the next segment of life and hopefully progress.

Thanks for reading and hopefully not being bored.

I have been listening to the new GAS album called Narko Pop, and it is really boring ambient music. But fitting for this blog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr-IC8ezynE