Let’s be clear, everybody, and we do mean every single person on the plant, starts out life as a kind of ‘wheelbarrow’. Now wheelbarrows are empty and powerless vessels that are filled by someone else and pushed by someone else. This is not a bad thing, it’s a design factor. Humans, like no other creature, are created with very little ‘pre-loaded’ stuff – What we do have is an incredible faculty and capacity to learn and learn big!  

However, as this is done over a long period of time and only done in connection, in relationship, to other human-beings, how you develop and grow heavily depends on who or what is filling you and pushing you and why. 

Up until you hit puberty, you’re set up to learn by that input and instruction. Once you hit puberty, your learning, your input and what you let direct you begins to be determined more by you…. Ah, but how you were prepared (or not) for that stage is a huge factor in you making smarter, wiser, safer, and sound developmental choices. So, the question is, who or what is influencing you and is it the best? (Click here for more)

‘Life is not sunshine and rainbows and thank you for teaching me that life is unfair — people disappoint you and there’s sometimes nothing you can do about that. A lesson well learnt from the both of you. Thank you for not being there to wave goodbye as I jetted off to Uganda on a trip of a lifetime, thanks for not being there when I got my first set of exam results to say well done, thanks for not being there when I got the position of head girl (a personal dream), thanks for not being there for me as I stood in front hundreds of people to speak at the Caird Hall for my school prizegiving, thank you for not being there for me when I needed you…

You’ve given me the greatest lesson of how to be independent. You have both allowed me to be a more patient and tolerant person than I could have imagined.

Parents, both of you, thank you for teaching me that taking drugs ruin lives, breaks families apart and gives no one a quality of life worth living. I'll be eternally grateful for this lesson you have taught me which has a message which has stuck by me until this day and always will, I have never and will never have a desire to take harmful substances through your example…

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