2014-07-03       Reflection by an inmate in a Hong Kong prison

(Comments welcome here)

LIFE IS LIKE AN ICE CREAM

One day two little girls were playing in their garden when they heard the ice cream van approaching; they ran upstairs to their mother to ask for money for ice cream cones. Their mother went down to buy it for them and then went back up to continue her tasks. The girls returned to the garden to enjoy their cones. After a while, though, one of the girls lost interest in her cone; she just held it in her hand while watching her sister. The ice cream melted away in her hands, and she didn’t even want to wash them.

A few day later they heard the van approaching the house again and this same sister was the only one to run upstairs to ask for money, but this time her mother said, ‘Not today’.

Life is like that. When opportunities come, we should make full use of them, otherwise they will melt away and never come back. Life is in essence what we do with the opportunities which come our way. Every choice has its consequences. The little girls had the opportunity to enjoy the ice cream cone, but she let it melt away. You too have been given life, but what you do with it is your choice. Some of the choices we make will haunt us forever. There is no point in blaming others when things don’t turn out the way we want. The lesson is to ‘sieze the day’ and not make choices that we might regret later. None of us are growing any younger and life, like the tide, awaits no man.

So no matter what your situation in life; how impossible or desperate it might seem, you can choose to be happy in it. Otherwise you will have to wait for a miracle in your life in order for you to be happy !! But remember that as you sit and wait, everything else sits and waits too ! If you think you have to be more than you are right now in order to be happy, you are putting an impossible condition on yourself. Being happy means accepting yourself right as you are at this moment ! You do not have to be rich, in love, or well connected to be happy. Your life is given to you in order to create its meaning. Finding that meaning goes together with being happy.

God gave us life, but we are responsible for being happy in it !

So make the choice to live your life happily ! Remember the saying: If you drink poison, it is not the person next to you who will die !!