Postcards from the Funny Farm

This is a guest blog post by Marcia from Tumbled Words.

We have been preparing for one thing or another most of our lives, haven’t we? Let’s take a trip back into our past in preparation for my one question quiz in honor of Damien and Sarah both being teachers.  (No cheating!)

Flash back to elementary school. We were taught to prepare for the next lesson. Sometimes we prepared merely by closing our book, putting away our pencils, and opening our eyes and ears.

Most of us learned to prepare for that next lesson on our own, eventually.

Now mosey on back to middle school (or junior high as my generation referred to it). We were taught to prepare for the next test by studying, and we did, but in our own way. We were preparing to grow up. Our preparation for tests varied: alone, in front of TV, in solitude, or with radio blaring; others studied with friends (in between making out or stuffing our faces with junk food); and those other two groups studied on the school bus as who knows what flew past their heads or they sat quietly at the kitchen table beneath mother’s watchful eye.

Yes, most of us managed to prepare for our upcoming tests — when we wanted to.

High school came and went too fast for some and interminably slow for others. We continued to prepare for tests, sometimes changing our method month to month. But we also learned to prepare for other things: meeting that hunky guy or hot girl, getting out of going to work, our weekend, avoiding our parent’s questions, avoiding our kid brothers and sisters.

Yes, we were quite successful at preparing - just not always for the task that should have been at hand.

College years snuck past some of us as just more of the same, but there, when we were paying attention, we prepared for our careers before they leaped out to ensnare us.

And so on.

You are prepared, right? Now, please, answer the following in one or two sentences:

With all that practice at preparing for things, why have so many of us failed to prepare for marriage or old age?

Just a question I needed to ask….

(Thank you Damien, for providing a wonderful venue for my question.)

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