A few weeks ago I was at a restaurant with my parents. Like every other modern family, we buried our faces in our smartphones after the waiter was done taking our order. Having read that constant phone face-burial can cause neck problems, I habitually raised my head to stretch my neck, before going back into aforementioned phone face-burial. But before that, I glanced at three men sitting at the table next to ours. At the first sight, it was any three middle-aged friends reuniting over beer and chicken. It was then that I noticed something strange about them. They were not using words, instead their hands and faces to talk to each other. Noticing the number of empty beer mugs on their table, I figured this could be a novel drinking game they were playing - no words, only dumb charades. But the sight intrigued me so much I could not take my eyes away from them. Thanks to the humdrum service of the restaurant, I still had about half an hour before my food could take my eyes and ears
It is a little too early in the year to talk about Christmas, but for this topic I believe I can take the liberty to at least quote a line, albeit prematurely. One of my favourite stories while growing up was Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. For those of you who do not know the story, it is about a greedy hardhearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge who has an eerie yet impactful experience on Christmas Eve. He wakes up to meet three ghosts, and each of these meetings leads him to becoming a changed man. I will not delve deep into the story, but one of the lines from the story that made an ever-lasting impact on me was said by the first ghost who visits Scrooge: "I wear the chain I forged in life," the Ghost says. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it." Habits are a chain we forge in life - a chain that can pull us down, or lift us up. It is very important to know that we ourselves are