Feeling the love

It's a funny old world.  My parents (lovely, kind, considerate people) got left a particularly condescending and arrogant note for parking in a neighbours car park space.  Whilst I understand it can be irritating (I'm not immune to the odd 'they're in my space' sigh, temporary grouch - and then moving quickly on) I've always felt it's really important to be relatively reasonable (in fact even to the people who were parked for a considerable period of time blocking the road exit from my work recently - maybe that's taking the British politeness too far I wonder?) but especially to my neighbours in our little community.

Anyway it got me around to thinking about telling people what we think of them.  I think so often we cruise through life on autopilot assuming everyone knows what we think it because we know it.  So, armed with the one rule my dad drilled into me and my sister growing up (Thumper's daddy's rule - if you don't know it it goes 'If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all') I thought I'd do just that.  And told a few people what I thought about them.

It was a great feeling - I did get some lovely replies (which wasn't the point of the exercise but a nice added bonus) and to feel that I was able to be honest and open with people for no reason other than I was feeling gratitude for having them in my life.  Some people I texted, some I spoke to - it ddn't really matter I just felt an overwhelming urge to say thank you.

Yes my parents 'shouldn't' have parked there but I'm very glad they did and inspired me to feel this way. And yes, I've written to the person concerned to thank them too.