"We are so overwhelmed with things these days that our lives are all more or less cluttered. I believe it is this, rather than a shortness of time, that gives us that feeling of hurry and almost of helplessness. Everyone is hurrying and just a little late. Notice the faces of people who rush past on the street. They nearly all have a stained, harassed look and anyone you meet will tell you there is no time for anything anymore."
I feel like this sometimes. Can you guess who wrote this??
Pioneer girl, Laura Ingalls. Granted she wrote this in the latter part of her life after she had, electricity, running water and a phone so she wasn't referring to pioneer America which she is best known for. But it speaks volumes to me that someone circa 1919 would be complaining about stuff and being hurried and harassed.
Can you imagine what she would think today????
Perhaps we always think that prior generations had a "more simple" life and perhaps they have. (certainly they had less stuff) Sometimes I think that stuff does add a level of complication to our lives.
Consider the phone. When people first got phones no one had to consider much about it except the fact that it worked. They all looked the same. Everyone had the same phone. No one cared.
Now we all have different phones and they all look different and they match our decor and they do different things and we need to "research" one before we buy it (I'm guilty of this) and they do more than your neighbors phone and soon they'll probably tell you when to eat and go to the bathroom. And now we use up precious time in our lives, time we will NEVER get back considering every possible thing there is to consider about our d@mn phone. And our ring tone for goodness sake! One day I think my husband spent an hour on his ring tone! (It's his time so it's his business of course) but it's insane.
And extrapolate that into all of our stuff and all of our choices and we spend so much of our lives just considering stuff.
It may be time to reconsider.....
4 comments:
I'm very guilty of the researching every product to death before I buy it thing. But I've started to get to the point that stuff like ringtones and the like, I've gotten pretty jaded by.
I can understand the researching to a point because I want to get the best quality for my money. It just struck a nerve in me the other day to think about all this stuff and the time it eats that we will never get back. Of course the same could be said for blog reading ;-) But I tend to see that as a sharing of ideas and community!
Great post! Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of my personal heros. Thanks for sharing that quote of hers.
Really, what is the hurry? What would happen if we all decided to slow down?
Oh me too simple blog writer! For the longest time I always felt like those books were written just for me.
One time I went to Sioux Falls SD on business and I took an extra day and rented a car and drove myself to DeSmet and visited all the sites, including the surveyors house which is set up just like the illustration in the book. Anyway, just as I'm about to go in, I have tears in my eyes and tell the woman (because I went there alone and had no one to share this monumental life thing with.) "You have no idea what this means to me." and she laughed and I realized that she's probably talked to thousands of people feeling the exact same thing!
Anyway, if we all slowed down we would probably all be a lot happier. If some of us slowed down then I imagine they would worry the faster people were beating them at something.....
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