The groove of habits

Ancient streets of Pompeiiwhich was discovered today by the careful work of generations of scientists and archaeologists who removed layers of ash, shows untouched what life was like there almost 2000 years ago, before the eruption Vesubio mont.

Among the traces that have remained fixed and trapped in time are also those that, due to the constant passage through the streets, have gently shaped the passage of carts. There, buried in the ground, as if they were the fine product of a machine, you can see the traces that the wheels left behind forever. Curiously enough, it seems that the pace would have been the same for all traffic, and that no charioteer dared to turn the wheels beyond the rails which were corroded by the common use to which they were subjected. The same happens with cattle, which always come to the watering hole by the same route and mark it taking off with a soft but usual thump of his legs.

A habit, good or bad, becomes an imperceptible task that we develop without realizing it. Others can see and discover it, so we can see it; but when it is encysted, it makes us blind to our own sight, it becomes a part of us. That is why it is so harmful at home and in our children to unknowingly inculcate this cluster of harmful habits which, as if they are part of our growing hair, do not stop growing and becoming a part of us.

A lack of gratitude is one of those habits that are picked up at an early age, become chronic and become parasites of the personality. The saddest thing is that, when parents enter the third age of life, that is, the third part of life, they want their children to show them gratitude that they themselves did not know how to nurture.

They committed this mistake unknowingly, it is true; every time someone opened the door to let them in and they didn’t appreciate it, or when they got a gift and, without saying anything, did great effort to thank those who gave itbecause they were not born, or when they did not thank their children for doing them any service.

The truth, as hard as it sounds, it’s that they were simply sponges of receiving what you showed them in that part of gratitude. If your teaching was poor, and your seed of gratitude poor, with To God, or with life, or with everything else, harvest thanks in your old age, he must be poor. These are clear rules that life gives us in its manual, but many of us make the mistake of never opening it, never reading it, keeping it in the glove compartment of the car, in pockets of clothes, in the traps of forgetfulness and laziness.

Your kids will be like you in these things, because it’s a part of the rulebook that you may not have wanted to read. If he Fate gives you the luck to have from them, the affection you did not give them when they were children, consider yourself very blessed, because as I said oracle of delphithere is only one species that walks on all fours, then two, then three, and that is man.

When rust settles in the joints, when the hand trembles even in the embrace of the cup of coffee, affection will be more necessary than any other medicine. Gratitude, not the lack of it, is one of those habits that we want to last in our lives, to be marked forever, like the grooves of those wheels that today’s and tomorrow’s visitor can see in the city where he was born. and that it prospered and was later destroyed in those mother slopes of Vesuvius.