Advice to A Daughter: Catching Thoughts Like Spider’s Webs.

 My clever friend Sharon, smiled when I showed her my current notebook with its index of contents, and told her that I had indexed three earlier notebooks, re-discovering  earlier drafts for articles, posts and stories that made me

think. 

Clever Sharon keeps everything - her notes, stories, articles and complex domestic domestic planning in her capacious head. I write everything down, catching thoughts like fragments of spider’s webs before they escape.

Now, in yet another notebook, I have rediscovered some advice I write to my daughter ten or so years ago. For some reasons I wrote it sideways across the page - don't ask me why.

My daughter (another writer with notebooks)  tells me that when she comes across something she wrote last year, it's as though it were written by someone else. She reads it with fresh interest and is even even inspired to think again.

So now I see what I wrote eight years ago. 

Advice to D

·       Don’t iron
·       Enjoy being on your own. Being solitary is not being lonely,
·       Embrace passioanate encounters , both emotional and intellectual
·       Cultivate your women friends and encourage the feminine side of the men in your life.
·       Live as though there is no tomorrow and also as though you will live forever.
·       Sit beside the sea for one month every year
·       Know that you are truly beautiful
·       Make things to your own measure
·       Tell people only positive things about themselves.
·       Forgive people early; being unforgiving is corrosive for your soul.
·       Go to the theatre to experience live creativity
·       Love yourself and you will always be able to love others.
The advice  seems to hold even now….