Sometimes people act without thinking about the consequences to their actions, and this is a bad thing, because consequences can influence other people’s lives as well as their own. The worst example of this is when adults, especially parents, do this to their children. More so, bad behaviors can turn back against the people that act badly. The following is an example that also illustrates the “Golden Rule” or the idea of “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
I remember a Romanian folk story that I know from my grandmother about a multigenerational family, grandfather, father and son. This story is a perfect picture of what can happen if somebody acts wrong, without thinking about the consequences.
The grandfather was very old, suffering from trembling and loss of all his teeth. The father was a selfish and bitter man, and the young child was trying hard to be like his father, the image of perfection for the little kid.
One day the old man was eating a bowl of soup in the living room. His hands were very shaky, and he could not reach his mouth with a spoon. The few drops that he had from the spoon spilled on his cheeks. He tried to keep the bowl in a hand, under his chin, but his hands were too shaky and the bowl slipped away. Reaching the floor, the bowl broke, and all the soup spilled on the rug.
The boy’s father, the son of the old man, seeing how his living room became dirty because of this, started to scream with anger: “I am tired of you! From now on, you will eat only in the kitchen, from the wooden plates! Get out of here!”
The little boy was watching from a room corner at what happened between his father and grandfather.
The next day the boy goes in the garage and begins to carve a bowl from a nice piece of wood. His father, thrilled, asks him why he carved that bowl. The child, looking kind in his parent’s eyes, answered: “I do this for you, for when you will be old and with no teeth, like grandpa! I want to be sure that you will have just in time a nice bowl, not like the old and scratched one that grandpa must use now!”
In Romania people use wooden plates only for feeding pigs. People eat in ceramic, glass or porcelain dishes, and all other animals are nourished in clay pots or ceramic ones. To offer a wood plate to a human being is a big offence.
I am sure that the child’s father understood in that moment how mean he was toward his father. The consequences of his action turned against him. It is true that sometimes people get a chance to modify their behavior and even to correct bad moral lessons that they teach others. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Consequently, the best thing is to think twice before acting or teaching somebody else to do something.
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