Aphorism

One of those emails making the rounds asks what aphorisms you grew up with.

aphorism ~ a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation, as “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton).

The first one to come to mind, which I therefore decided meant it was the most important in my little pea brain, was "If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing well."

It occurs to me now that having that aphorism stuck in my mind was not a good thing at all, but positively negative thinking (pun intended). Here's why ~ because my brain dotes on flipping a thing around and looking at it from all possible angles. When I do that, I get something like this: "If a thing isn't worth doing well, why bother doing it at all?" or "If I don't have time to do it well, I might as well not do it at all." See the problem? This became a problem for David when he was in kindergarten. His teacher told me he wasn't turning in any of his art assignments ... because he never completed any of them. Why not? Because he would get frustrated that a painting was not "good enough" and wad it up and throw it away. Then he'd start over ... and not have time to get finished before the class moved on to something else. So being a perfectionist meant he got absolutely zilch done. Maybe I've been like that.

Another saying seems to have been my guiding light: "Put yourself in the other person's shoes." This comes from a purported old Native American saying: "Don't judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins." (Or the cynical version: "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes; that way, you're a mile away from him, and you've got his shoes.") I think I’ve overdone this one by being overly concerned about hurting someone by what I say or do.

I have not done well with this one, either: "A penny saved is a penny earned." I have been so busy saving pennies, that I haven’t been greatly focused on earning dollars. My bad!

Click here to see some aphorism cartoons.