There are certain things about modern life, and the way we approach modern life that I just cannot get myself to agree with.
One of these is the extreme degree of importance we place on this whole thing of always being busy, and always being "in the grind" and showing up and doing whatever it is we're supposed to be doing 24/7/365.
Arguments about the necessity of doing so and the whole "sign of the times" angle aside, it is just not a healthy approach to living!
I spent a little time sitting on my back porch because it was a nice warm late spring day today, and I was reminiscing about my elderly auntie... about whom I have written from time to time.
One of the things about Aunt Ulla was the fact that she liked to take things at her own pace.
And she lived in this lovely house where I spent many a summer (and other parts of the year), and one of the things I always noticed was that the speed of living was a lot slower there.
And although her door was always open to visitors, and we would have friends and family members from parts near and far come by and spend a weekend or a week... and pretty much the same thing would happen with every visit. Or, at some point during every visit.
We would be eating dinner or lunch, or maybe doing a gardening project — which was something people really enjoyed as part of being there — and Ulla would suddenly look at somebody and say "are you trying to make it to a train before it leaves?"
That comment simply an observation that someone seemed to be rushing.
Now let's keep in mind that we're going back to the 1970s,1980s and 1990s when this was happened, and we weren't even in the USA... we were in Denmark where life already is slower than in the USA, yet this particular issue still came up.
Why are we all in such a hurry?
Personally, I hate rushing, and Aunt Ulla hated rushing as well. She was always quite willing to take the next bus or the next train if we didn't make it there by the originally planned time.
But the funny thing is: we almost never had to do that because we didn't try to cram so much into our days that we would end up being late for the bus of the train in the first place.
Fear of Missing Out?
And maybe that last sentiment approaches getting close to some sort of reason why we end up in these situations; being stressed about the fact that we "don't have enough time" to do our work and still live our lives.
When and where did we get this idea that life is somehow "incomplete" unless we get all the things jammed into the available time? What would happen if we missed a few things? What if we were to actually abandon this popular saying of our age which is "you can have it all" and instead adopted a saying of "I will just choose a FEW things to have?:
Would some part of the economic machine that we have built simply fall apart and collapse, because we weren't always trying to have it all?
One of the things I find interesting is that whenever I talk to friends — whether it's by e-mail or in person — and they talk about "how busy" they are (I do it, too!) and how they never have time to relax and do certain things I pick up a relatively clear sense of the justifications why — as far as logistics go — but I don't get a clear sense of the reason behind why they feel the compulsion to run.
If we have to zoom out and take the 50,000-foot overview I guess we have been imprinted with some sort of strange "life based FOMO" that unless we're constantly striving we're missing out, somehow.
I remember how slowly my grandparents in Denmark used to take their lives.
There weren't any more things that needed doing than could be done at a comfortable pace. Certainly, they didn't live in a "McMansion" and they didn't have a late model Mercedes in the driveway. They lived in a modest two-room apartment, and felt that they were fairly fortunate to have a still working 20-year old SAAB.
The rest of the time they rode bicycles or took the bus or the train.
Overall, they were happy, and definitely not stressed.
When did we lose sight of the fact that choosing such a life is actually an OK thing, rather than a symbol of failure?
Having been raised mostly by older people perhaps my perspective is a little different from my peers and certainly considerably different from the perspective of our children and our grandchildren, even... who are now starting to enter their teenage years.
Regardless of the origin, I can't help but think we'd do ourselves a good turn by simply slowing down and living life at a human pace!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2024-06-08 01:05 PDT
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