Making Guiding Memories - carefully

I was at the vets recently and one of the girls working there seemed familiar.  This usually means she was in Guiding and I spent ages trying to remember her name or which Guiding adventure I know her from before greeting her.

Sadly I'm rubbish at names and struggle with the memories so usually end up asking them to remind me.  In this case it turns out I spent the best part of 7 days looking after this girl on a camp, a fantastic camp and my memories of it were happy.

So it's interesting that her first memory was completely different, she said "it was that eventful week"  I had completely forgotten the shenanigans surrounding the close relative of one of our leaders who had come along as a helper.  She chose that week to tent swap with an alternative scouter to her spouse, causing great consternation with leaders, a young leader getting overly concerned and emotional about the whole thing and constantly discussing it with the guides despite being spoken to about not doing so.  It was in fact fairly tense and I do remember thinking at the time it should have been dumbed down and dealt with after camp but that's easy for me to say.  It was not my family, my experience and my upset.

But the point is: as leaders we need to be careful about the overriding memories we imprint on our young members of what should be their mountain top moments.

This is my lasting memory of that week:




I hope she has great memories of other things on that camp and perhaps she brought this one up because I was a leader there, not directly involved in the hurt and she would know it was safe to do so.  I hope that is the reason.

Anyway, she is a lovely adult now and bless her, she gently held my beautiful, darling cat whilst it was put to sleep.  And I am so grateful that she was able to do that when I was not. 

But back to camps: may the best of times be remembered for being the best of times and may we always carry for ourselves the thought "Was it a bad day? Or was it a bad 5 minutes that you milked all day?" - let's try to hold the happiest thoughts as the memorises and the incidents as experiences to learn from.