Dear Reader,

Saturday I was visiting a nice little pond near my house, its name translates literally to “Frogs’ Lake”. Here is a photograph:

Frogs’ Lake

While my kids were playing constructing some fortification with branches and I was sitting on a bench near the shore reading the fantastic book “Factfulness“, we heard a man cursing on the other side of the pond.

“They be damned!” he thundered. “To come here and leave those bloody plastics there!”

I saw a wonderful opportunity and gathered my children. No more than half an hour before the event I picked up a candy wrapping from the path and put it into my son’s backpack. Now I asked them: “Have you seen what happened?” They said “Yes, he was upset for the plastics, but he did nothing about it, dad! He could have stopped and picked them up!” “EXACTLY! Has complaining ever solved anything?” “No dad”.

I was the proudest person in the world at that moment!

However, just to be sure, I told them that we needed to go round the lake to see whether the garbage was retrievable or not.

Lo and behold, minutes later this was the scene we encountered:

The gritty garbage

Time to pick up the bottle, empty it and put into the backpack: 15 seconds. Energy spent: comparable with yelling for 5 seconds.

Shutting down the internal voice that begs for complaining is not an easy task, but the rewards for taking full responsibility for every situation are freedom and self-respect.

Until next time, I hope that you prefer the latter.