[true tales] the case of the boy who would paint

We tend to guard that which we don’t have, be it love, time, money or whatever and closest to my heart is Bryson’s tongue-in-cheek definition of Paradise: Blank spaces in my Diary. The theme in my work this week was scheduling blank spaces at certain times in the schedule and disguising them as time commitments, then treating them as sacrosanct and one thing which arose from all this was the case of the Boy who Painted. My friend is a busy man who works an average twelve to thirteen hours a day and each hour needs to pay for itself. Therefore travelling, for example, is lost income. He made the mistake of showing one client his late-evening painted ceramics and, fascinated, she asked if he could spend some time with her little son, teaching him the art. You see the dilemma of course. What to do? How to gently refuse? He chose not to refuse and perhaps this was wise because the spin-offs might be far more than a happy child and satisfied altruism – things like this have a habit of snowballing, his reputation would be enhanced and for the cost of a lost hour, he might become a more desirable business partner as the story gets round. At least it seems that way to me.