I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just get discouraged. Like the seasons, which change whether we want them to or not, I feel motivated at times, and quite lethargic at others. Lethargic, not in the big picture that is life, but in the day-to-day obligations to the irrelevant, the things that require constant attention, the things that one needs to keep up with in order not to drown in the debris of one’s own life. You know, the idea that if you don’t fix that drippy faucet you’ll use up all the extra water on the planet, one drop at a time. If you don’t wash your car you won’t be able to find it in a dark parking lot. If you don’t eventually do your laundry you’ll continue to look just like you do now. And who would invite you to their holiday party looking like that?
It’s all the ‘got-to-do’ stuff that dominates our time. There are always meals to cook - if you don’t eat you die, or at least you get very hungry. There’s that haircut you need to get – got to keep looking good for the morning mirror, even if nobody else really cares. And you’ve got to keep the sink unclogged, otherwise you’ll have to take the pipes apart. There are leaves to clean out of the gutters, and wax to clean out of your ears. There is always garbage to take out and firewood to bring in. There are car repairs to keep up with – oh, that ‘built-in-obsolescence’ thing? Hmmm. There’s grocery shopping to squeeze in – let’s see now, I can buy these nice potatoes at full price, or I can get two bags of chips for the price of one. Guess I’ll have to go with the chips. Oh yeah, and they’ll even track my buying habits with my Safeway card. Sweeeeet deal. There’s the banking to do – I’ll let them use my money now, then I’ll borrow it back from them later, but of course, at a much higher interest rate. There are bills to pay - beware the perpetual threat of the dreaded credit rating. And there are all those unsolicited credit card applications that you have to sort through daily, otherwise they pile up like un-read newspapers next to the couch. I’ve started putting all that crap back into the pre-paid return envelopes and sending them back where they came from. Let the credit card companies sort through them, and let them pay the postage to do it. There’s the house to clean - who wants to live in the dirt? Well, actually, we clean our houses, and then we go camping in order to live in the dirt for a weekend. Why not just NOT clean our house and stay home in the dirt? Would save a lot of time and expense. There are phone calls to return, calls we didn’t answer because we don’t want to talk to someone when they want to talk to us; we want to talk to them when WE want to talk to them. And of course they don’t answer our return call because they want to talk to us when THEY want to talk to us, and not necessarily, again, when we want to talk to them.
This phone protocol, having ingratiated itself so deeply into our culture, seems to waste most of the remaining time that we might otherwise have had to do something more constructive with, like maybe writing another stupid blog like this one.
I don’t know. Sometimes I get discouraged.
