Having returned from Manchester after a long weekend, where we celebrated my elder son’s graduation and ensconced him back at home, I returned to the booklet and ruminations. On Change:

• Change what is in your power to control (if it needs changing).
• Lasting change cannot be imposed externally.
• Change requires a vision of a better alternative.
• The vision must be followed by resolve, motivation, and a practical plan of implementation.
• Change whatever is self-destructive, harmful to others, mindless, routine, numbing, unhealthy, ill-fitting, burdensome, unnecessary, unwanted, and without evident benefit.
• The greater the change, the greater the effort required to bring it about.
• Great change can only occur over a significant period of time.
• Change requires effort to maintain it. The force of gravity exerted by that which you are intent on changing will tend to pull you back towards itself.
• Change may require endurance, discomfort, and sacrifice in order to be effectual.
• Change can be either dramatic, gradual, or imperceptible. (Sometimes the most enduring and significant changes take place when we think that change isn’t taking place at all.)
• Types of change: relinquishment or abandonment, conversion, modification or adjustment, and redirection.
• Nothing remains the same. If you don’t change something, it’ll slowly change by itself … but not necessarily in the way you’d like.
• There are times when we need to expend energy preventing a change from taking place.

By lunchtime, I’d developed a further ten pages of the booklet. Afternoon. I continue, in the hope of inserting all the main body text by the close of the day.

Guests’ walkway, graduation, Whitworth Hall, Manchester University (July 22, 2016)

In the end, my ambitions were thwarted by a file-deletion crisis regarding the SD card I used to photograph my son’s graduation on Friday. Having administered the requisite software program, the information was restored. Today, few things besides the soul are irretrievably lost.