I’ve been silent on this blog for quite a long while now. Life just took over and let’s face it, I had better things to do than spend time on the net. I’m not sure if I’ll start regularily posting or not, nor what subjects I’ll be posting about. Time will tell I guess.
I’ve had the following post in my drafts folder for nearly a year now and never knew whether to post it or not as it’s quite personal. But then I used some of the material in a speech I gave at Toastmasters, so I felt what the heck, just post it. You don’t have to read through it, if you do, you’ll have a good insight as to why I am the way I am. If you don’t, that’s OK too, thanks for stopping by.
Role models can inspire us to aim for goals and achieve ambitions which we think are beyond ourselves.
Tiger Woods, Bono, Mahatma Ghandi are quite often given as role models. Does this mean that to be a role model you have to be famous? Or can an ordinary person be a role model to the people around them?
Well I’ve got two role models and most of the world don’t know them, never have heard of them. They are a couple that at the age of 58 accepted to take on raising a 7 year old child as their own. They didn’t say to the child’s father: “We’ll take him for the holidays, but certainly not put him through school. We’ve been there with you and your siblings, we’ve earned the right to enjoy our retirement.” Nope they didn’t say that at all, although I’m sure that somewhere deep inside them they probably fleetingly thought it. What they told the child’s father was this: “OK, we’ll take him for a year, let you sort yourself out, get a stable position and then next summer he’ll come back to you.” well that’s the cleaned up version as there was quite a lot of giving out to the man who was giving up his only child.
So who are these folks? My grand-parents. And I will never ever be able to thank them enough for “saving” me from the life I would have had with either of my parents. I’ve had a brilliant childhood, in a very protected and loving environment. I got the education that I was capable of following. I never ever went hungry again, I never ever got beaten, all I got was unconditional love. They never pressurised me to be the best, they left that to myself. I always felt that because they were looking after me when really they didn’t have to, I had to show them that they weren’t wasting their time with me. So I tried to do well at school, I tried to be a gentle, caring person, I tried to stay on the “right” track of life so that they wouldn’t be disappointed. After all their own son had done that before me.
I wasn’t the best at school but I wasn’t the worst. I got through university and got a degree from an English university, which considering that English is not my mother tongue, was quite an achievement.
I wasn’t an angel either. I did the usual little mischief that a boy gets up to, but all fairly harmless and in hind sight quite funny.
My grand-mother died one day short of her 80th birthday and it devastated me. Even more than when my mother died a year and half prior. I suddenly felt like an orphan. The woman that cared for me all those years, that nursed me back to health whenever I got ill, who hugged me when I needed hugs, who congratulated me when I did something well. She wasn’t going to be there anymore. And it left a huge hole in my heart. But at the same time I knew that for as long as I lived, she would live on in my memories.
My grand-dad is still alive and although I live in another country and don’t see him that often I feel quite close to him. I had the great pleasure of introducing him to his first great-grand-child: our son. Boy was I proud! And I was even prouder when he called me son, in front of his own son (yes four generations of the same family were in the same room).
So what’s the point of this blurb? Well, my grand-parents are my role models. They didn’t break any records, they didn’t make the headlines, they didn’t conquer the useless… They did way more than that: they raised me to become the man I am today.
So you see, you don’t need to become rich and famous to be a role model. Just be compassionate, loving and caring of those around you and, as far as I’m concerened, that’s the best role model anyone can ever be.
