My Husband's Shoes

So you have a pair of shoes, beautiful soft buttery leather. You treasure them. You have had them for a long time, but each time you put them on, you love the comfortable and familiar feeling they give you as they envelop your feet. They make you feel good wearing them and you know that people always admire them. You care for them very much, always polishing them and making sure they are stored properly in your wardrobe, wrapped in tissue paper and boxed.

One day, you decide for some reason, that you want a change from the beautiful, comfortable shoes that you love. But you don't want to make much investment in them. You spot a discount shop - Savashoe - in the high street and see a cheap pair of shoes that look like they will make you feel good. You eventually acquire these shoes, and at first, they look new and shiny and are flawless in your mind. The make you feel good, hell invincible. You realise that you don't have the same respect for these shoes as you do for the soft buttery leather ones, and you don't polish them regularly, or wrap them in tissue and put them in box in the wardrobe. You very often just kick them off at the end of the day, and never think about them until the next time you wear them.

After a few weeks, the new shoes start to make your feet feel tired and uncomfortable. You get bunions and callouses, and they make you irritable. You wish that you had never bought them, in fact you rue the day that you saw them in the shop and realise that you could never get the same feeling from those shoes as your soft buttery leather ones. But each time you see them kicked into the corner of the hall, you remember the initial feeling you had when you first spotted them in Savashoe, and somehow you "forget" how uncomfortable they are to wear, and how they hurt and damage your feet in a way that once didn't seem possible, so you persevere, almost stubbornly, and continue to wear them on occasion.
Besides which, wearing those shoes has become a bit of a bad habit. They are there in your eyeline each day, kicked into the corner of the room where you last left them. Unpolished, tatty laces and worn out plastic uppers.

One day, the shoes cause an indescribable amount of pain; pain like you have never felt before, your crippled feet mis-shappen and bleeding. You are hobbling around and can't wait to find the nearest dustbin in which to dump them. You do so at the first opportunity.

You return to your wardrobe and seek out the soft comfortable buttery leather shoe, the one that ALWAYS felt good as it enveloped your feet, the one that NEVER caused bleeding or callouses or bunions.

But, because you have hobbled round in the cheap painful shoes, when you slip the soft buttery leather shoes on, you find that they have changed. You have not worn them for some time, or polished them, and your feet are different now too. You try desperately to get the old shoes to fit, you really want to feel the familiar warmth of the leather around your foot, secure and safe.

The only way those shoes will ever feel secure and safe around your foot again is if you spend a lot of time and effort polishing them, nurturing them with care as you did in the past, softening the leather, checking that the laces are in good order and caring for them properly. Your feet too need attention, and with help and diligence, one day you might get those shoes to fit again and appreciate the comfort and enjoyment you used to have from them.