Directly behind my house at the bottom of my garden, is the Peak Forest canal, winding its way towards the industrial northwest. From my back window, I can look over the brown waterway, across the valley, to the bare green hills of the Peak District, Chinley Head, and Edale beyond. A train line is etched into the distant landscape and many times a day I see the small steel caterpillars, ferrying people through the hills from Sheffield to Manchester, over the viaduct, before they just as quickly disappear from view.
“Do you know what happens to trains when they reach their destination, Sheila?” my father, Bert Littlewood once said.
We were out for a long walk in our beautiful northern countryside. My father was taking the time to teach me about the names of trees and flowers, something he did regularly, but now he was pointing at one of the passing trains.
“Once that train completes its journey,” he said to me, “they will take the carriages and shunt them onto new lines, to form a new train.”
“Why do they do that?” I had asked him.
“Because there is always a new train, with somewhere new to go,” he replied kindly. “But shunting is a difficult and slow job. It requires a lot of energy. It has to be done carefully.” I imagined these huge, hulking carriages being pushed and pulled at Manchester station. I wondered who did this work. It seemed impossible.
I stared at the train, wide-eyed. My father always had this glorious ability to make the world around me feel alive and vibrant, even if we were doing the most mundane of things. He would explain everything to me in detail, teaching me the name of every plant that we came across. Even in our saddest moments, when my mother was sick with Tuberculosis, we would search under bridges until we found what we were looking for.
“We must find an icicle, Sheila,” he would say. “They will make your mother the perfect lollipop.”
Even as a Great Grandfather many years later, he had a rule for the children in his car.
“If you shout Great at the roundabout, I will drive around it again,” he would say.
“Great!” they would chant on cue. Around he would go.
“Great!” they would shout again. Around again.
“Great!” they would yell.
Children have a wonderful tolerance for dizziness.
Maybe it was the fact that my father was the youngest of twelve children, that made him so patient and kind to the people that he met. He never spoke poorly of others and was just as quick to remind me that he wouldn’t accept it from me either.
“What faults you see in me, take care to shun,” he would say to me. It was a clear reminder that nothing good comes from spending time looking at people's faults. It is funny though that I don’t remember the word ‘shun’. Instead, the saying always makes me think of the trains.
What faults you see in me, take care to shunt.
You see, it's very easy to see faults in people, and everyone has them of course.
“Show me a perfect person,” my father would say, “and I will show you the hair on the palms of their hands.”
It is quite easy to talk poorly of a person, isn’t it? Maybe it makes us feel better in the moment, but it rarely lasts. It is far harder to ‘shunt’ those negative thoughts and take your time to see the good instead, but once you practice seeing the good, I have noticed that it becomes easier and easier, and you’ll never be far from the right track.
See you next week.
Lesson 3: All joints on the table are to be cut. Friday, March 3rd
Love this lesson! It’s fun to picture your gran as a child and then she is now sharing the story with you. So much wisdom.
Law of Attraction! Brilliant Gran 💜