LIFE

How often do you think about LIFE?  Just that.  LIFE.  If you're like I am, not very often.  I am here now after 316 of these articles and I am just now getting around to mentioning this subject.  It's because we think a lot about the details of life, but rarely about the reality of life itself.  We think about vegetable life, animal life, earthly life, social life, life style, sex life, city life, pro-life, after life and more, but I've run out of lives to enumerate.  When I was in school, grammar school, that is, life was rather simple.  There was human life and there was chicken life.  We raised chickens.  Chicken life was not very long and generally came to an end on the chopping block, followed by the plucking, gutting, cooking and eating.  Human life was that activity which had the strength and the freedom to use other forms of life for its benefit.  Along the way, being raised in a deeply spiritual and religious family, the other dimension of life for humans was the relationship with God and His world of Saints and Angels.  See, I started by saying that when I was younger, life was simple.  Ha!  Just a few sentences into the narration, it got complicated, didn't it?  Of course it did.  I haven't even mentioned the fact that in my mother tongue there were two ways of talking to people.  There was the polite way which required different grammatical forms, and the familiar way which didn't require special forms, but was nevertheless different.  That's a wrinkle that English speaking children don't have to contend with.  Then, of course, things really got a little more complex when I found out that to get by in this country, knowing English was a must.  Jeepers, creepers, was this thing ever going to get easier?  Not really.  Not for the first born boy.  There was house cleaning, diaper changing, chicken feeding, plucking and cleaning, grass mowing, victory garden work, school work, fishing, baseball and mumbly peg.

Now life is really getting difficult to organize.  But, somehow I got through it.  We all do.
One of the interesting aspects of life as I see it is the nearly constant effort that we make to define it in ever simpler terms.  We have Robert Frost and his famous poem, "The Road Less Taken."  Easy choice.  One of two things.  Now we all know that this is certainly far from the reality that we all know.  Instead, we find ourselves bombarded with lists of "simple rules" to follow that guarantee a happy life.  It used to be that these lists appeared in books that were too expensive to buy, so the contents didn't interfere with the course that we were carving out for ourselves anyway.  Now, of course, hardly a day goes by that we are confronted with PowerPoint Shows with beautiful pictures of stunning flowers, sweet music and a list of life rules that are assuredly the source of happiness in life.  Oh, that it were that simple!  
Some 50 years ago, I happened to be a college - level student in philosophy.  One of the topics that we had to confront was, "What is life?" Ha!  At 23 who cares?  Since I was there for a reason, I decided that it might be fun to hear the answer.  I'll tell you the way it was told us, and then I'll translate it.  <Vita, sui motus est.>  "Life is self motion."  The topic got quite a few hours of treatment, but it didn't contribute to making life any simpler.  We did learn that the motion of water boiling is not indicative of life and that oxidation of iron is also not a sign of life.  Whoopee!  Doesn't that make you happy?  Come on admit it, it does, doesn't it?
I am not going to get too deep with this thought because I feel that it is better to leave you to your own devices in this area.  The only thing I'll say before leaving you is that however life is defined, it strikes me as something about which we should be happy.  Just put yourself in touch with the joy you feel in the morning after having been "dead" for a few hours.  Feels good, right?  Enjoy it.  No matter how complicated it gets, it's a gift that we look forward to every day.
Finally,  remember what I told you, No crying is allowed at my funeral.

SIMPLER TIMES?

 

Simpler times?  This is one of the top pictures that came up when I did a Google search for something appropriate for this post.  Why do this?  I had to repair a leak in the commode so I went to buy the part I needed at Home Depot.  As I was checking out, the cashier and I got into a little friendly exchange of quips.  I slipped her a twenty and she smiled and said, "Living simply today, aren't we?"  I said something like, "Yeah like old times" and she came back with, "Simpler times."  As I began to leave I simply said, "they weren't that simple."  All she had time to rejoin was, "Simpler than now."
OK, enough with the senseless exchange.  I'll leave it up to you.
Wood or coal furnaces/stoves vs gas or electric
Washing machines with mechanical wringers vs automatic washers
Clothes lines vs dryers
Seasonal adjustments to diet vs worldwide distribution of food stuffs
Spark plugs with 10,000 miles of life vs whatever we have today
Stove top cooking vs microwave
Newspapers vs Internet
Party telephone lines vs cellular phones or Skype
Library vs Google
Must iron clothing vs wrinkle proof material
Need to learn cursive handwriting vs machine driven communication
Fountain pens vs ball point/gel pens
Manually shifted autos vs automatic transmissions
Banks open from 10 to 3, 4 and 1/2 days per week vs round the clock, 7/24 access

Finally, Catholics went to church and didn't understand a word of Latin.   Now we go and it is in the language of the location.  Simpler times?  What am I missing here?  I lived in those "simpler" times.  Give me my cell phone and my laptop, any day.  Oh, and I almost forgot, I really like not having to change light bulbs, tires and spark plugs so often.