Today was Labour Day holiday - the first was in 1890, celebrating the struggle for an eight-hour working day, which allegedly NZ workers were among the first in the world to achieve. Someone forgot to tell whoever designed my current job description. I did no work today, in protest, rather than in celebration! I will of course, pay for it during the week!

This weekend also celebrates an anniversary of something else... 10 years ago on Labour Weekend, my father celebrated his last birthday. I can see him now, gaunt as he was, sitting in his wheelchair blowing out some candles on a cake. He most enjoyed the trifle, as I recall, and he did get very very tired. 10 days later, on Melbourne Cup day, he died. At one point as I was sitting in the hospital, I read a quote from Twain, in a Readers Digest, which I have often reflected on in the years since:

"What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written and cannot be written (or shared). Every day would make a whole book of 80,000 words--365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man--the biography of the man himself cannot be written."

At the time, it was very poignant, but as time has passed, I have come to understand even more deeply the truth of this statement. How much we see and think and process internally, that never gets recorded anywhere but on the inside of our minds. How much of it is forgotten 2 seconds later, and how much is retained for years and years, only to come back to the surface when we least expect it.