End of term

So today is my DS’s last day of his first year at school. From now on he will no longer be in Reception, he’ll be a Year 1 pupil.

It seems such a short time ago that we were all nervously preparing for his first day. He’d been at the same nursery since he was 9 months old, so moving to school was a big change for him. Luckily his best friend from nursery went into his class with him, plus a couple of children he knew from outside nursery, so it wasn’t as hard for him as for some. Also, he was one of the oldest - he was very nearly 5 when he started school, whereas some of the summer birthday children had only just turned 4 when they started.

Reflecting on the year, he seems to have gained a lot from it. He is good at maths for his age, and his reading is going well, but the thing that is best is that he has really gained in confidence. He enjoys school, and his teachers and the other children (both boys and girls) seem to like him a lot. I sort of feel that, whatever his academic/work achievements in later life, if he has good friends and knows how to make new ones he’ll be OK.

Finally, he seems to have got through his first year at school without learning any really rude words. I wonder how that happened?

Bureaucracy gone mad

I've just had a phone call from the AA doing a customer satisfaction check on the service I received when I had to call them out to get the wheel off my car and change the flat tyre.

It seems that my AA patrolman gets less than full marks because he was supposed to have filled in a form for me detailing what he'd done to my car.

That is, he was supposed to waste his time and mine filling in a bit of paper telling me that I had a large nail in my tyre. Which I could clearly see. How ridiculous.

Karma

I’m not a Buddhist, but this made some sense to me:

“Karma, or action and result, means that if you want to improve anything, yourself or something else, then you have to work on the improvement yourself - this is Buddhism. I think an understanding of karma is still useful even for those who do not totally accept it ... Up to now - when and where you were born, who your parents are, your brothers and sisters - things like that are all caused by actions in your past life or lives and you are now experiencing the result. But it is also said that you do have some choice to plan for your future - both for next year and the next life. Your future depends on what you do right now. Right now you are planting the seed - that is the cause - and you will experience the result later ... The result, the future, is in our hands; our actions now will create a result. The law of karma does not mean that you just sink into a sleep, thinking, ‘There is no point. All I can do is wait for the result’. Our present human life carries the experience of the result of our past actions, but at the same time we are creating our own future. If you see it in this way, everything is not pre-determined by karma, because we are also creating our own, new karma. One thing I keep on saying is, ‘Doesn't matter what you did, what matters is what you do now so that you can make your future better’. “

Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche