# 3 Welcome to Lifelong Lessons, May 4, 2025

The Ocean was/is my Best Friend

Oh my, retrospect is 20/20, and the older we get

the more we realize all that we do not know.

We May Not Know, But Seniors Learn And are a Wealth of Lessons Lived

Self-esteem, confidence, embarrassment, rejection, ridicule, trauma, tragedy, grief, mistakes, mental struggles, emotional struggles, addictions, the unexpected, how do we even make it into hope, triumph, inspiration, resilience, and fortitude? With help and support from others. That's how. With a good heart, good intentions, compassion, empathy and a willingness to share even at the risk of humiliation.

I learned the hard way the danger of feeling alone, walked like the attached girl in my ocean below my house when I needed to get away. It became my sanctuary and comfort, until the ocean turned on my family and me ... and took my baby brother in a riptide.

My baby brother, catalyst, and angel. Wasn't he handsome?

Follow my blog at francenegillis.ca, and laugh, cry, get angry. Empathize as I look back on what I did not know then, but know now. Or at least I think I do. With too much death in our young lives, grief overpowers. An older brother killed at 21 in a car accident, a mother dying my second year of university, a father who suffered health ailments. A lot for a child, and yet secrets also plagued, with no one to tell. To survive, it helps to laugh at ourselves and at what if funny. Life is simply too serious. Humour reminds us of the laughter and the innocence of children, our master teachers if we let them. In them are priorities.

To Be So Free, but children need love, success, and acceptance to develop confidence and self worth!

Children Are Our Teachers If We Let Them!

Seems ironic, we learn from the very young, the older, and all ages in between.

Lessons we learn over a lifetime; the aged among us have a great deal of wisdom and experience. Listen to them, and talk to them and have them share lessons learned.

In children I see the potential of living unobscured by society's and adult "taintedness".

What lessons have you learned from children?

Feel free to leave your comment, share a story, funny or serious.

Out of the Mouth of Babes ...

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