(These thoughts are changed three times weekly and cover a wide range of subjects and insights)
You're worried about the economy? Be patient. We will recover. We have before! It's all in the history of finance so keep reading.
During the Revolutionary War my ancestors bartered everything from bullets to bread to animal skins to tobacco. It was called "country money." Since paper money wasn't worth a Continental they probably traded on the cow/pig market as well. I'll give you three of my pigs for your cow. It worked except that finally more and more people decided money was better for the simple reason that it is difficult to carry a cow around in your back pocket. And yes sometimes no one was interested in the other farmers pigs or cow. Supply and demand.
However, whether the currency of exchange is bovine or Wall Street backed investments recessions have taken place and will continue to take place. The very nature of finance demands a certain number of bumps in the road.
It is doubtful there was a mortage loan crisis in 3100 BC in Mesopotamia but since this was the beginning of writing and the keeping of accounts most likely some accounting was less than accurate and some frinancial decisions less than wise. The first banks in Babylon looked like temples and palaces because that is exactly what they were. The name of the first real recorded Banker was Pythius who operated in Greece and Asia Minorl. Their money didn't read "In God we Trust" and as time went by, as always, the ways of some men could not always be trusted either. People learned from their mistakes and for several decades didn't make them again.
When another five hundred years had passed the Code of Hammurabi began to take charge. It was obvious that without some kind of laws governing banking operations a natural inclination toward greed and bad decisions would take over (was taking over) and whoever had desposited would soon find nothing left of their deposits. By 2550 BC Cappadocian rulers were starting to guarantee the weight and purity of silver ingots but still the equivalent of a dollar might vary. People were trying to make the whole money business work. They really were!
A large portion of the popualtion wasn't affected one way or the other because they had nothing to bank or barter with. They were slaves and when compensation was doubled they never noticed because multiply nothing by two, three or even four and you come up with the same figure.
Money is whatever you say it is. By the year twelve hundred the larger the Cowrie shell collection the richer the collector. Indeed, the Chinese character for money originally represented a Copwrie shell. That's right. Worth is both a subjective and objective thing.
By 687 BC the fist crude coins were minted in Lydia, Asia Minor. This allowed the first retail shops to open. Commmerce as we know it was on its way.
The history of war and money cannot be separated. Even the word "to pay" comes from the Latin word meaning "to pacify." Wars cost money and national war debts are ageless. An eighteenth century writer once wrote, "Nowadays that prince who can best find money to pay his army is surest of success." Out of such a truth arose the practice that if there isn't enough money to fight a war, practice deficit spending and let future generations pick up the check.
In our own brief national history the Colonies in America were traditionally short of real coins. Indeed, our enthusiastic acceptance of paper money and its suppression by the British was a factor in provoking the American Revolution. By 1740 England was giving a great big "No" to the colonies and their printing of paper money. In 1775 as the Revolutionary war began and hyperinflation took over. Among the reasons, in North Carolina there were seventeen different forms of money declared as legal tender. Who said that bad financial decisions were limited to any one century?
When the war finally came to an end a new era began, a war between debtors and creditors. In 1812, over twenty years after our beginnings we still didn't have a National Bank to exert a restraining hand on commercial banks. it was eighty years before we finally started to get our act together. Progress moves slowly, slower and slowest but eventually it really does move.
Now it is the 21st century and certain questions arise as they have always arisen. Are we in a recession or a depression? What investments are good or invitations to disaster? What is the next economic problem laying just around the corner? For years by barter and banter, by banks and Savings and Loans or by money hidden under the mattress American have sought the better ways to manage money rather than be managed by it.
And the dollar? What is it worth? What one could buy in 1913 for $1.00 would today cost $21.78.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
A LANGUAGE PROBLEM
(These thoughts are changed three times a week and cover a large variety of subjects and insights)
I remember the first time I saw the word "adult language" preceding the showing of a film. Was it just that I would be hearing obscenity or was it a kind of permission time? Was it verbal pollution finally getting a stamp of approval in living color? Men and now more women have been cursing for years. It is just now Hollywood was opening up creative classes to teach children how and adults to imjprove their cliched chatter; G-D, the F word and all their children..do they make life better? Can they be called moments of inspiration that brighten mornings' glow or evenings' serenity? Or do they just allow undisciplined expression to fill in in places of solid thought? Almost everyone has sworn at some time in his or her lives, some with more restraint than others, some with no restraint at all. The problem is that after awhile the sweared at and the swearee no longer noitce. Like a pig in the mud, after awhile it just doesn't matter any more.
I remember the first time I saw the word "adult language" preceding the showing of a film. Was it just that I would be hearing obscenity or was it a kind of permission time? Was it verbal pollution finally getting a stamp of approval in living color? Men and now more women have been cursing for years. It is just now Hollywood was opening up creative classes to teach children how and adults to imjprove their cliched chatter; G-D, the F word and all their children..do they make life better? Can they be called moments of inspiration that brighten mornings' glow or evenings' serenity? Or do they just allow undisciplined expression to fill in in places of solid thought? Almost everyone has sworn at some time in his or her lives, some with more restraint than others, some with no restraint at all. The problem is that after awhile the sweared at and the swearee no longer noitce. Like a pig in the mud, after awhile it just doesn't matter any more.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
BE A DANDELION
(These thoughts cover an infinite variety of subjects, approaches and insights and are changed three times a week.)
You have to learn to flower where God has sown you so be a dandelion? Bloom in the face of people who want to dig you up and throw you away. That is the dandelion you know.
On every mountaintop there are trees growing out of rocks because they have latched on to the tiniest piece of opportunity; a few gathered grains of soil. And even in the desert an oasis rises green and vibrant against a backdrop of desolation.
And yes, there are a thousand trees that never grow and acre after acre of sand that produces no oasis. And yes, millions bemoan where they find themselves on the field of life and shrivel up and die, while others do prosper with no more than starlight when what they would prefer was the bright light of high noon.
Not where you live but how you live where you live. Not what is your job that is the worst job in the whole wide world but what do you do with the hours away from your job. Looking for people to love you or looking for people to love.
Write a letter to your future self. It will help you to gauge more closely who you are and how you got to be what presently you are. Apply the positives and keep them alive. Learn from the negatives and bury them.
It is called a personal history book and everyone is in the process of writing one by how they live and love and shape their being.
Many years ago, from time to time, a young man used to speak briefly to our mid day luncheon club. He did so from a twisted, sitting position that arthritis had frozen his body into. He could not have stood if his life had depended on it. He spoke from a field of life not of his choosing, to spread beauty where otherwise people would see only the ugliness of deformity.
Carl Sandberg once described a very unusual man. He wrote, “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, (but) in the mixed shame and blame of the immense wrongs of two crashing civilizations, often with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and on occasions he was seen to weep in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.” His name, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.
On November 29, 1623, William Bradford, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, made an official Thanksgiving Proclamation. It was their 3rd year in the new country and all had not been going well. Nearly half the Pilgrims had died and it didn’t look as if things were going to get better any time soon. But what did Governor Bradford do? He proclaimed that the survivors be grateful and thankful, and not allow themselves to be overwhelmed with complaining.
It may have been an over-extension of optimism, but hurray for over-extension.
C. K. Chesterton said there are two ways to have enough: one is to get more, the other is to desire less. What I am saying is that if you really want to be happy you need to fall in love with your own life as it is over and over again. To search out and polish up the silver lining on your clouds. To look up at the night sky and see both stars and darkness, but allow yourself to be over-whelmed by the twinkling lights rather than by the deep dark blackness of outer space.
Sometimes, because life has been unkind, we are like a seed – surrounded by darkness. It is then we are truly challenged to grow toward the light.
You have to learn to flower where God has sown you so be a dandelion? Bloom in the face of people who want to dig you up and throw you away. That is the dandelion you know.
On every mountaintop there are trees growing out of rocks because they have latched on to the tiniest piece of opportunity; a few gathered grains of soil. And even in the desert an oasis rises green and vibrant against a backdrop of desolation.
And yes, there are a thousand trees that never grow and acre after acre of sand that produces no oasis. And yes, millions bemoan where they find themselves on the field of life and shrivel up and die, while others do prosper with no more than starlight when what they would prefer was the bright light of high noon.
Not where you live but how you live where you live. Not what is your job that is the worst job in the whole wide world but what do you do with the hours away from your job. Looking for people to love you or looking for people to love.
Write a letter to your future self. It will help you to gauge more closely who you are and how you got to be what presently you are. Apply the positives and keep them alive. Learn from the negatives and bury them.
It is called a personal history book and everyone is in the process of writing one by how they live and love and shape their being.
Many years ago, from time to time, a young man used to speak briefly to our mid day luncheon club. He did so from a twisted, sitting position that arthritis had frozen his body into. He could not have stood if his life had depended on it. He spoke from a field of life not of his choosing, to spread beauty where otherwise people would see only the ugliness of deformity.
Carl Sandberg once described a very unusual man. He wrote, “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, (but) in the mixed shame and blame of the immense wrongs of two crashing civilizations, often with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and on occasions he was seen to weep in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.” His name, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.
On November 29, 1623, William Bradford, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, made an official Thanksgiving Proclamation. It was their 3rd year in the new country and all had not been going well. Nearly half the Pilgrims had died and it didn’t look as if things were going to get better any time soon. But what did Governor Bradford do? He proclaimed that the survivors be grateful and thankful, and not allow themselves to be overwhelmed with complaining.
It may have been an over-extension of optimism, but hurray for over-extension.
C. K. Chesterton said there are two ways to have enough: one is to get more, the other is to desire less. What I am saying is that if you really want to be happy you need to fall in love with your own life as it is over and over again. To search out and polish up the silver lining on your clouds. To look up at the night sky and see both stars and darkness, but allow yourself to be over-whelmed by the twinkling lights rather than by the deep dark blackness of outer space.
Sometimes, because life has been unkind, we are like a seed – surrounded by darkness. It is then we are truly challenged to grow toward the light.
Monday, June 8, 2009
THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING
(These thoughts are added to three times each week)
AS YOU CONSIDER THE THOUGHTS BELOW JUST REMEMBER THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CAN AND CANNOT IS ONLY THREE LETTERS!!!!!
The Power of Negative Thinking does come easily. Some people have earned their PHD in it. If you are or have occasionally been one of these folk there is a test you can take to see if you still have the stuff it is made of. JUST KEEP ON READING!
Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, walk outside and stamp a flower. Scream at a sparrow. Kick a tree. On your way to work, triple your honking power. Honk when there really is no reason and make it long and loud. Short of having a wreck, work toward winning Road Hog of the Year Award. It may come easily but that does not mean positive influences might not inflict great harm. So beware, the Power of Positive Thinking is a mighty force and nothing to be made light of. TOTALLY NEGATIVE PEOPLE HAVE BEGUN TO THINK POSITIVELY AND CHANGED THEIR LIVES AND THOSE AOUND THEM. IT CAN HAPPEN.
In the continuation of your test and the pumping up of anger, frustration and depression don’t stop with anything less than maximum output. At work or at home, if you are asked to do something extra, pout if you are a woman or mutter if you are a man. If someone says, "Thank you," give him or her a blank stare. If you feel a smile coming on resurrect some real or imagined hurt. If an associate or a mate shares with you a good idea, grunt. If it is an exceptional idea, feel threatened. If he or she still won’t go away, kill their enthusiasm by saying, "It won’t work." Above all else avoid any social issues that might cause you to take a stand. TO KEEP THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING ALIVE AND WELL IN A LIFE DOES TAKE SOME EFFORT!
When lunchtime rolls around be sure and have a meal that heightens your cholesterol and enthuses your ulcer. Have your fourth or fifth cup of coffee for the day and in the middle of the afternoon your third or fourth candy bar so your blood sugar can continue to ride a roller coaster. Start on your third pack of cigarettes, preferably near a non-smoker. DO NOT MAKE LIGHT OF ANY OF THE SUGGESTIONS ABOVE. THEY HAVE BEEN TRIED BY MILLIONS AND THEY WORK WONDERS!
If it has been a workday, at its close shove toward the elevator and race toward the parking lot. Remember that you will have been on emotional overload since early morn and you don’t want to lose your edge. Everyone wants to get out of the parking lot first. Don’t let them. Drive like you are in a demotion derby. Nudge but don’t dent until you have made several other drivers as miserable as you are. You may even want to write down license numbers as trophies. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS TO REMEMBER WE ARE ALL RULED BY HABIT. IT JUST DEPENDS WHICH HABITS WE KEEP ON KEEPING ON!
When you come back through your front door, kick the dog, yell at the children if they happen to be around, complain about congress, cuss about gas prices and gulp down your dinner. If you have to go out for the evening lament you never have time for yourself. If you don’t have to go out; turn on TV, switch from station to station, finally fall asleep, snore and prepare to do battle all over again. CHANGE FROM NEGATIVE TO POSITIVE? iT ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN? IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED?
It does require consistent effort to be a card carrying Negative Thinker. Keeping alive the best of one’s worst is never easy. Because, yes, there are positive guidelines and hope filled nudges that might get in the way if we give them half a chance. Therefore, a word to who ever will listen, "Control yourself because if you don’t you might actually become a person you enjoy keeping company with."
AS YOU CONSIDER THE THOUGHTS BELOW JUST REMEMBER THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CAN AND CANNOT IS ONLY THREE LETTERS!!!!!
The Power of Negative Thinking does come easily. Some people have earned their PHD in it. If you are or have occasionally been one of these folk there is a test you can take to see if you still have the stuff it is made of. JUST KEEP ON READING!
Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, walk outside and stamp a flower. Scream at a sparrow. Kick a tree. On your way to work, triple your honking power. Honk when there really is no reason and make it long and loud. Short of having a wreck, work toward winning Road Hog of the Year Award. It may come easily but that does not mean positive influences might not inflict great harm. So beware, the Power of Positive Thinking is a mighty force and nothing to be made light of. TOTALLY NEGATIVE PEOPLE HAVE BEGUN TO THINK POSITIVELY AND CHANGED THEIR LIVES AND THOSE AOUND THEM. IT CAN HAPPEN.
In the continuation of your test and the pumping up of anger, frustration and depression don’t stop with anything less than maximum output. At work or at home, if you are asked to do something extra, pout if you are a woman or mutter if you are a man. If someone says, "Thank you," give him or her a blank stare. If you feel a smile coming on resurrect some real or imagined hurt. If an associate or a mate shares with you a good idea, grunt. If it is an exceptional idea, feel threatened. If he or she still won’t go away, kill their enthusiasm by saying, "It won’t work." Above all else avoid any social issues that might cause you to take a stand. TO KEEP THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING ALIVE AND WELL IN A LIFE DOES TAKE SOME EFFORT!
When lunchtime rolls around be sure and have a meal that heightens your cholesterol and enthuses your ulcer. Have your fourth or fifth cup of coffee for the day and in the middle of the afternoon your third or fourth candy bar so your blood sugar can continue to ride a roller coaster. Start on your third pack of cigarettes, preferably near a non-smoker. DO NOT MAKE LIGHT OF ANY OF THE SUGGESTIONS ABOVE. THEY HAVE BEEN TRIED BY MILLIONS AND THEY WORK WONDERS!
If it has been a workday, at its close shove toward the elevator and race toward the parking lot. Remember that you will have been on emotional overload since early morn and you don’t want to lose your edge. Everyone wants to get out of the parking lot first. Don’t let them. Drive like you are in a demotion derby. Nudge but don’t dent until you have made several other drivers as miserable as you are. You may even want to write down license numbers as trophies. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS TO REMEMBER WE ARE ALL RULED BY HABIT. IT JUST DEPENDS WHICH HABITS WE KEEP ON KEEPING ON!
When you come back through your front door, kick the dog, yell at the children if they happen to be around, complain about congress, cuss about gas prices and gulp down your dinner. If you have to go out for the evening lament you never have time for yourself. If you don’t have to go out; turn on TV, switch from station to station, finally fall asleep, snore and prepare to do battle all over again. CHANGE FROM NEGATIVE TO POSITIVE? iT ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN? IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED?
It does require consistent effort to be a card carrying Negative Thinker. Keeping alive the best of one’s worst is never easy. Because, yes, there are positive guidelines and hope filled nudges that might get in the way if we give them half a chance. Therefore, a word to who ever will listen, "Control yourself because if you don’t you might actually become a person you enjoy keeping company with."
Friday, June 5, 2009
IT WAS A LITTLE CHILD
(These thoughts are added to three times weekly and cover a multitude of different subjects and insights)
I caught a glimpse of heaven today. It shone like a bright and winsome morning star.
It was a little child.
I saw it first in those first sleepy moments of awakening when those new blue eyes met the beginning day with a smile.
It continued through a breakfast of cereal, cold milk and giggles.
It tugged at my heart as I watched this child of mine walk the free streets of a free land on the way to school.
So much to learn. So much to learn.
I watched the unmarred vessel of God’s creation,
listened to the tinkling voice of hope, felt the glow of the treasury of dreams for
a magic land of brighter tomorrows.
I thought about the heritage of every new young life –
A backyard sand pile becomes an Everest;
A front-yard mailbox a guide stone on some African expedition;
And the shade of the old willow tree a mansion for a potentate and his queen.
This is a child: a tear followed by a million more,
But as quickly followed by a smile.
An anger that screams defiance but manages in the brevity of a moment
the deity of forgiveness.
This is a child, not yet fallen heir to the
dubious gift of adult despair.
By the child is the teacher taught.
Upon this tender package of God’s affection is placed maturity;
but first the child touches with simplicity our cluttered souls,
seeks to unwind our troubled hates,
points to God’s squadron of daily miracles against
the most troubled skies.
I will grow older, maybe wiser.
I will look up and pray a thousand times and a thousand more.
I will move further and further from that day when I, too,
was new to earth, and I can but hope I will always
both teach and learn at the feet of a child.
I caught a glimpse of heaven today. It shone like a bright and winsome morning star.
It was a little child.
I saw it first in those first sleepy moments of awakening when those new blue eyes met the beginning day with a smile.
It continued through a breakfast of cereal, cold milk and giggles.
It tugged at my heart as I watched this child of mine walk the free streets of a free land on the way to school.
So much to learn. So much to learn.
I watched the unmarred vessel of God’s creation,
listened to the tinkling voice of hope, felt the glow of the treasury of dreams for
a magic land of brighter tomorrows.
I thought about the heritage of every new young life –
A backyard sand pile becomes an Everest;
A front-yard mailbox a guide stone on some African expedition;
And the shade of the old willow tree a mansion for a potentate and his queen.
This is a child: a tear followed by a million more,
But as quickly followed by a smile.
An anger that screams defiance but manages in the brevity of a moment
the deity of forgiveness.
This is a child, not yet fallen heir to the
dubious gift of adult despair.
By the child is the teacher taught.
Upon this tender package of God’s affection is placed maturity;
but first the child touches with simplicity our cluttered souls,
seeks to unwind our troubled hates,
points to God’s squadron of daily miracles against
the most troubled skies.
I will grow older, maybe wiser.
I will look up and pray a thousand times and a thousand more.
I will move further and further from that day when I, too,
was new to earth, and I can but hope I will always
both teach and learn at the feet of a child.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
HOW ARE YOU AND LEISURE THESE DAYS? Or Why So Many Breakdowns or The Secret Children Have or...
(These thoughts are added to three times each week)
There’s a joke that must be almost as old as Eden. It reads, “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety now and we have no idea where she is.”
The object lesson is priceless. If she was walking toward somewhere to accomplish a particular job, then what she was doing was work. If she was just walking to enjoy the company of Mother Nature, it was leisure. If she was walking to work and enjoying the experience, it was attitude.
There is a new definition that has broken across the horizon. It is called “Weisure.” It describes all the laptops on the beach at vacation time, drivers driving in traffic with cell phones glued to their ears and fathers watching their sons with one eye at little league while with their other eye they are text messaging to a fellow worker.
And now a question. Are you incapable of taking a few hours away from the desk or housework for fishing, or opt for a game of tennis, or work in your garden or to just take a short afternoon nap. Or are you a workaholic and proud of it? Is today’s worker more aware of the calendar than the clock? Has nine to five gone the way of the horse and buggy? Do you chop yourself up in so many pieces that most of the time you can’t find yourself?
As concerned workers in a world that needs our best, we do not have the right to kill time. And I know that for me, one long unending holiday would be pure hell. Pure unadulterated idleness twenty-four hours a day actually can be killing. But I also know that work without respite grinds down the best of us and that many who see themselves as hardworking saints are really weary grouches out of control.
William James wrote, “Neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns. But their cause lies, rather in that absurd feeling of hurry and having no time in breathlessness and tension and anxiety.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in The Baretts of Wimpole Street, thoughtfully protested, “What frightens me is that men are content with what is not life at all.”
We, men and women, do not live by excessive labor alone. We live also by sitting quietly before the flickering flame of a campfire, by holding the hand of one we love, by just being alive to grin rather than grind.
William Muldoon, the famous athletic trainer once said, “People do not die of disease, but of internal combustion.” A respite from our daily duties is a good time to get our insides straight mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Leisure lets us freeze frame life’s blur long enough to appreciate it.
A CEO of a large corporation leaves his office several times a week to walk along a nearby river. “I love my work. I just want to keep it that way,” he explains.
In describing children at play, Will Durant once wrote, “What purposes moves these children to their wild activity? What secret desire sustains their energy? None; the play is the thing and these games are their own reward.”
When is the last time you took off your shoes and wiggled them in the mud in a sparkling stream for no other reason than it was there and you wanted to? Can you remember when you traded in the wild-eyed curiosity of a child for the sedate, respectable, sometimes truncated attitudes of an adult?
We certainly have a moral obligation to use well the gift of life, a gift that has been almost doubled in the last 100 years. We also have an obligation not to misuse it. Yes, there are bills to pay but we constantly need to study how many things we now call a necessity that once were a luxury. And at the cost of a closet full of things we have a heart heavy with weariness and worry.
Leisure time? Leisure time is for swapping stories around a campfire; for children and parents getting to know each other better. It is the season for listening, for giving a sympathetic ear to a stranger or a friend. Leisure is the season for giving. It feeds time with a smile because we have not wasted the muscles of opportunity.
Leisure is the time for patience and forgiveness. But patience and forgiveness aren’t easy and when we are bushed it is even more difficult. For then we are more easily angered and less likely to even try to understand. Leisure gives us the chance to bounce back emotionally, physically, spiritually.
Leisure is a time for getting to know yourself. Ask me who in my life has given me the most trouble and I must admit, “Me, when I let myself get too tired and out of sorts.”
If when leisure comes you find you cannot relax because you’re too busy…then you are right, you are too busy.
What I am talking about, of course, is discipline. How much leisure is too much and how little is too little. It is not easy finding a good modus operandi for delegating the hours and minutes of each new day so we do no waste time or allow ourselves to be wasted by time.
Would you find peace in your work or play? Then find a personal Eden: one you can go to that overlooks a mountain or a stream, or one that watches crashing waves, or, as in my case, a back porch where the setting sun turns everything to Kodachrome. I’ve carried a book there often to read and then never read the book. Just sat quietly and watched the turn of the leaves in a soft evening breeze and listened carefully to the song of one bird to the other.
But if some such kind of paradise is not possible, strive to find a calm and restful place within yourself. A little more hush and a little less hustle found by at least some brief slowing down rather than continually speeding up.
There’s a joke that must be almost as old as Eden. It reads, “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety now and we have no idea where she is.”
The object lesson is priceless. If she was walking toward somewhere to accomplish a particular job, then what she was doing was work. If she was just walking to enjoy the company of Mother Nature, it was leisure. If she was walking to work and enjoying the experience, it was attitude.
There is a new definition that has broken across the horizon. It is called “Weisure.” It describes all the laptops on the beach at vacation time, drivers driving in traffic with cell phones glued to their ears and fathers watching their sons with one eye at little league while with their other eye they are text messaging to a fellow worker.
And now a question. Are you incapable of taking a few hours away from the desk or housework for fishing, or opt for a game of tennis, or work in your garden or to just take a short afternoon nap. Or are you a workaholic and proud of it? Is today’s worker more aware of the calendar than the clock? Has nine to five gone the way of the horse and buggy? Do you chop yourself up in so many pieces that most of the time you can’t find yourself?
As concerned workers in a world that needs our best, we do not have the right to kill time. And I know that for me, one long unending holiday would be pure hell. Pure unadulterated idleness twenty-four hours a day actually can be killing. But I also know that work without respite grinds down the best of us and that many who see themselves as hardworking saints are really weary grouches out of control.
William James wrote, “Neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of our breakdowns. But their cause lies, rather in that absurd feeling of hurry and having no time in breathlessness and tension and anxiety.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in The Baretts of Wimpole Street, thoughtfully protested, “What frightens me is that men are content with what is not life at all.”
We, men and women, do not live by excessive labor alone. We live also by sitting quietly before the flickering flame of a campfire, by holding the hand of one we love, by just being alive to grin rather than grind.
William Muldoon, the famous athletic trainer once said, “People do not die of disease, but of internal combustion.” A respite from our daily duties is a good time to get our insides straight mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally. Leisure lets us freeze frame life’s blur long enough to appreciate it.
A CEO of a large corporation leaves his office several times a week to walk along a nearby river. “I love my work. I just want to keep it that way,” he explains.
In describing children at play, Will Durant once wrote, “What purposes moves these children to their wild activity? What secret desire sustains their energy? None; the play is the thing and these games are their own reward.”
When is the last time you took off your shoes and wiggled them in the mud in a sparkling stream for no other reason than it was there and you wanted to? Can you remember when you traded in the wild-eyed curiosity of a child for the sedate, respectable, sometimes truncated attitudes of an adult?
We certainly have a moral obligation to use well the gift of life, a gift that has been almost doubled in the last 100 years. We also have an obligation not to misuse it. Yes, there are bills to pay but we constantly need to study how many things we now call a necessity that once were a luxury. And at the cost of a closet full of things we have a heart heavy with weariness and worry.
Leisure time? Leisure time is for swapping stories around a campfire; for children and parents getting to know each other better. It is the season for listening, for giving a sympathetic ear to a stranger or a friend. Leisure is the season for giving. It feeds time with a smile because we have not wasted the muscles of opportunity.
Leisure is the time for patience and forgiveness. But patience and forgiveness aren’t easy and when we are bushed it is even more difficult. For then we are more easily angered and less likely to even try to understand. Leisure gives us the chance to bounce back emotionally, physically, spiritually.
Leisure is a time for getting to know yourself. Ask me who in my life has given me the most trouble and I must admit, “Me, when I let myself get too tired and out of sorts.”
If when leisure comes you find you cannot relax because you’re too busy…then you are right, you are too busy.
What I am talking about, of course, is discipline. How much leisure is too much and how little is too little. It is not easy finding a good modus operandi for delegating the hours and minutes of each new day so we do no waste time or allow ourselves to be wasted by time.
Would you find peace in your work or play? Then find a personal Eden: one you can go to that overlooks a mountain or a stream, or one that watches crashing waves, or, as in my case, a back porch where the setting sun turns everything to Kodachrome. I’ve carried a book there often to read and then never read the book. Just sat quietly and watched the turn of the leaves in a soft evening breeze and listened carefully to the song of one bird to the other.
But if some such kind of paradise is not possible, strive to find a calm and restful place within yourself. A little more hush and a little less hustle found by at least some brief slowing down rather than continually speeding up.
Monday, June 1, 2009
LONELINESS! WHAT CAN AND SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT!
(These thoughts are added to three times each week)
Mother Theresa didn’t title the following thoughts “How to Cut Down on Loneliness,” but if you do what she suggests, it can do just that.
Accept the fact that people are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind and loving, some people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind and loving anyway.
The good you do today, people may forget tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Loneliness today is an epidemic. There are exceptions to the rule but too often these days some people know their neighbor’s dog better than they know their neighbor.
Just about everyone knows the parable of the good Samaritan, but more important than the healing of this wounded traveler’s bumps, bruises and breaks was the healing of his pain of loneliness – all the people who simply passed on by without taking the time to care. And then, finally, someone did not pass him by. And his smile was a mile wide and as stratospheric high as the happiness in his heart.
Do you remember the tragic story of the death of Kitty Genovese more than two decades ago in New York? Loneliness must have been a living hell for her as time and time again her neighbors watched, without helping, as her killer’s knife ripped and tore at her body. The wounds from which she finally bled to death were an agony, but the pain of loneliness must have been almost as great.
I remember one particular time when loneliness was my constant companion. I had committed myself to a 55-day speaking tour but because my mother had become seriously ill, my wife Tucky had to remain in Miami to take care of her. Though my heartstrings vibrated to a song of despair, my wife’s absence was made more bearable by those, in the places where I spoke, who surrounded me with their special concern. And I thought how wonderful a world it could truly be if daily everyone did more than just brush egos against egos.
A complaint I have heard in hundreds of counseling sessions is a wife or husband lamenting, “I start to tell the story of my day and am interrupted before I’m even half way through.”
And troubled children voicing the same discontent. “I began to tell Mom and Dad about what’s happened at school, and they’re so busy telling me to sit up straight or get my elbows off the table or go study or….they never hear.”
It is very lonely to feel that no one really cares what we have done or had done to us.
But when we pause to listen, to give a helping hand to give sometimes no more than a smile…loneliness, at least momentarily, takes a back seat and the world of all of us is the better for it.
Mother Theresa didn’t title the following thoughts “How to Cut Down on Loneliness,” but if you do what she suggests, it can do just that.
Accept the fact that people are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind and loving, some people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind and loving anyway.
The good you do today, people may forget tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Loneliness today is an epidemic. There are exceptions to the rule but too often these days some people know their neighbor’s dog better than they know their neighbor.
Just about everyone knows the parable of the good Samaritan, but more important than the healing of this wounded traveler’s bumps, bruises and breaks was the healing of his pain of loneliness – all the people who simply passed on by without taking the time to care. And then, finally, someone did not pass him by. And his smile was a mile wide and as stratospheric high as the happiness in his heart.
Do you remember the tragic story of the death of Kitty Genovese more than two decades ago in New York? Loneliness must have been a living hell for her as time and time again her neighbors watched, without helping, as her killer’s knife ripped and tore at her body. The wounds from which she finally bled to death were an agony, but the pain of loneliness must have been almost as great.
I remember one particular time when loneliness was my constant companion. I had committed myself to a 55-day speaking tour but because my mother had become seriously ill, my wife Tucky had to remain in Miami to take care of her. Though my heartstrings vibrated to a song of despair, my wife’s absence was made more bearable by those, in the places where I spoke, who surrounded me with their special concern. And I thought how wonderful a world it could truly be if daily everyone did more than just brush egos against egos.
A complaint I have heard in hundreds of counseling sessions is a wife or husband lamenting, “I start to tell the story of my day and am interrupted before I’m even half way through.”
And troubled children voicing the same discontent. “I began to tell Mom and Dad about what’s happened at school, and they’re so busy telling me to sit up straight or get my elbows off the table or go study or….they never hear.”
It is very lonely to feel that no one really cares what we have done or had done to us.
But when we pause to listen, to give a helping hand to give sometimes no more than a smile…loneliness, at least momentarily, takes a back seat and the world of all of us is the better for it.
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