A Time For Everything...
...And everything in it's OWN GOOD time, as my late father was apt to say.
And we're gonna be short & sweet today with this post.
Cut to the chase...meat & potatoes only, kapeesh?
No marathon today...think of this as a sprint.
--Today's world is full of things that grab our attention, for whatever reason and to a myriad of ends.
We're only going to hit on what I feel are the two biggest steers in the herd.
Many of those things have been around for quite some time, too, but these two are at the forefront.
Like nature...
--You good folks know I like the whole garden gig...and coming from a city, I suppose we all have a bit of that "wanderlust"...a desire to see MORE than canyons of concrete, and asphalt-covered roads. The garden is the first step (for me, anyway).
Since I was a young'un, I've been enamored with what we in Philly used to call..."the country".
Those were the places Dad would drive us into on those weekend "day trips to nowhere".
Pile in the car and drive somewhere OUTSIDE of the city...like it was some sort of foreign land (for a couple hours).
Well, to us living in row houses, it pretty much WAS.
Seeing horses and cows and grass...LOTS of green grass...and TREES of all sorts.
The smells as you drove out there was wonderful; none of those chemical or "man-made" scents you would find daily in the big old city.
Out in "the country" you could smell alfalfa growing, or freshly-mown grass.
(both of which were in short supply where we lived.)
And out there, life seemed to move at a slower pace.
Sure , time never changes in it's incessant advance, and there are no more minutes in a country day than in a city day...the people "out there" just utilized their time BETTER than (apparently) we did in the city.
Fewer diversions in the country, or at least DIFFERENT ones than we had.
Funny thing, dad could never see himself as a farmer, but he did like the country lifestyle. We were just never blessed with the opportunity to pursue that course in life. We made due with city living...and those trips to "the country".
Nature can often have that effect on city dwellers...a liberating feeling.
Perhaps that's why I took to hiking so readily...loved to waste a day walking through the woods in Pennypack Park, but to me, it was never really wasted...just enjoyed.
--Another thing that always grabs our attention is technology...no getting around that monstrosity.
We simply can't perform the most basic tasks without SOME form of it permeating our lives.
Makes me wonder how we survived as a species BEFORE all this stuff was around?
I'd like to think we USED to have a lot more SELF-reliance in times past.
We would do things FOR OURSELVES, because it was the ONLY way things would GET DONE.
Nothing around to "better" our lives..except our own two hands...and our own ingenuity.
And one of the things that makes me SO damn curious, is that now we DO have all these "amenities" such as cell phones and smart phones (no letter-writing any longer), social media out the wazoo (no more taking the bus or riding one's bike to a friend's house), and cars with computers on board that have vastly surpassed the computers that took our astronauts to the damn MOON (and we use those systems to find the nearest Starbucks...whatta colossal waste).
With ALL of these things (and so much more) we STILL claim that we simply do not "have the time"...for whatever we need (or want) to do.
Yes...go ahead and say it...
"WTF???"
That's right. Now either the parameters of what constitutes time itself have CHANGED dramatically, OR...we are simply NOT managing our time as WISELY as we used to, even with all these so called "labor-saving" devices at our beck and call.
I mean, I get bothered whenever the computer seems to run slower than normal, as I'm sure YOU do as well, which makes me ask (again) HOW we got by BEFORE such things...The post office delivered at the same speed with our mail, but we managed to WAIT. Eventually our letter got there, or a letter to US finally arrived. None of that "instant" aspect to written correspondence.
Today, we cringe at the junk in our email boxes instead.
And to think we have placed ourselves in this state in less than THREE decades.
--There is a saying that goes: "Never put off until tomorrow that which you can do today".
It does seem all of us are guilty of doing JUST that...putting something off, because we think we have the time, when we simply do not.
We are doing more every day, thanks to all this technology...that's a given.
But, is the QUALITY of what we do any better...and if not, WHY not?
It becomes the QUANTITY vs QUALITY thing...all over again.
Do we make the best of whatever time we have at our disposal?
Or do we simply wind up DISPOSING of that time?
(big difference there, hmm?)
Think on this...we have all these things and devices to "free up" our time...so what are we doing WITH all that FREE TIME now?
Are we managing to do MORE (and productive) things, or do we use it all up with trivial nonsense?
Well, we could be using that time to find even MORE ways to save us MORE time still, and that would be one nasty-ass Catch-22.
We could be striving to improve the human condition, and not just meandering about, GPS'ing the nearest Taco Bell, or texting someone behind the wheel, or tweeting that our ingrown toenail is bothering us today (btw, this doesn't apply to me, I was making a point...lol)
I used to think that the person who once said to "Take time to smell the roses" was some kind of hippie, dope-smoking free love advocate flower-child with nothing to do ALL day but stare at the sun in a drug-induced fog until they burned out their retinas...but I found out they were correct (AND none of the above).
Sometimes, we DO need to turn it all off for a spell..get back to some of our basics when it comes to living. Maybe we do need to take time to smell the roses...or even look out our windows.
And if that also means we go take that hike, or get our hands dirty in a garden, fine by me.
Granted that due to the price of GAS, those "drives to nowhere" are all but behind us these days, as the city (has now) migrated far into "the country".
There is little if any "nowhere" left to be found...there is just a whole lotta "somewhere" in it's stead.
But even those somewheres can be soothing...or instructive...or just plain fun.
And they can be as close as our own backyard...or nature preserve or park.
We just have to realize that we NEED such things, and perhaps more often than we think.
Yes, there are indeed possibilities when we know there is A TIME FOR EVERYTHING.
What we need to remember, is that it is impossible to do EVERYTHING with that time.
Be well, make a difference to someone, and...
Stay SAFE out there, America.