What is the most pointless advice you have received? Mine is: tomorrow is another day. That doesn’t even sound like advice – more like a colourless, odourless fact of life. Of course tomorrow is another day. No one said it was a bicycle or a fish or breakfast. So was yesterday another day (no one hands that out as sane advice), and if you think about it, today is another day too.
I blame Vivien Leigh and Gone with the Wind. The movie ends with her character Scarlet O’Hara attempting to pack in great profundity into that line. The best response to that, of course, is another line from the same movie, this from Clark Gable’s Rhett Buttler: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
When I was a boy and left food untouched on the plate, someone, usually my father, would say, “Eat your vegetables. Think of all the people who go hungry…” This is difficult for a seven year old to do. When eating, you do not think of hungry people or even well-fed ones. It is, at that age, an intimate activity that requires your full attention.
