When it comes to weddings there is a long-standing expression, tradition, or old wives tale for the new bride on her wedding day, which goes like,something old, something new… You probably finished it for me, so I won’t waste your time. I don’t want to go any further into the saying other then to say I am now married, attached if you will to this site. Two separate entities joined together.
In keeping with the expression for the purpose of this blog post I will offer to you, the reader, something old, then of course something new and so on to fulfill the entirety of the saying. Of course, each of the others will come in separate posts in order to populate my site with.
There are many places I could draw from to satisfy the something old portion of the expression. All would be deserving of mention, and I would feel I would be doing each a disservice by not. There is one however deserving to be told which can top the rest. I am referring to my great grandfather who, if he were still alive today would he nearly 120 years old. Old being the key word. More specifically however I am thinking about some of the expressions he was known to iterate. One of my favorites to this day is, “The day you stop learning is the day you die.” Now on the surface it’s a pretty straight forward no brainer expression. I always got a chuckle from its simplistic approach and meaning. It wasn’t until years later, probably even more than that when I conceptualized it differently. It might even be possible I had been hearing it said the other way, the day you die is the day you stop learning, who knows. It’s the other one I keep in my head. I will liken it to another expression I know which is very similar. It is taken from the bible, (no this is not going to be a bible lesson) in Genesis where it mentions the eating of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil Adam and Eve would die. Neither God nor my great grandfather were speaking of physical death. In God’s case it was symbolic of spiritual death, a separation between man and his creator. My great grandfather (although I held him in high regard as God, was not God) was speaking to the symbolic death caused by ignorance. So, whether it was original understanding of what my great grandfather was trying to impart to me, or the latter, both are very true and very applicable still.
I have been carrying around this idiom for nearly fifty years now, which certainly qualifies it as being old. Stat tuned for something new.
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