I recently accepted that the notions, or perceptions, I have, as related to my personal organization, are perversely; as I once considered them, not necessarily in my best interest. This is an amalgam of my personality traits, emotionally speaking, that override my rational or intellectual desires. More plainly stated, all my efforts to minimize the time I spend on drudgery; those tasks necessary to produce the environment I prefer ( I'm a known slave to a place for all things, and all things in their place ), done to maximize the time I have for the things that bring me pleasure, inevitably produce the time I desire which I then spend on all the things everyone( we'll leave those names out for now ) else needs from me.
I noticed this after a recent trip. In the half hour after I returned home, I had reduced all the detritus generated on such journeys to their proper place; trash, hamper, closet, etc. I'm like that. Have been for the majority of my life. I like, very much so, a clean orderly home. I do not like to clean. This has been the source of much misunderstanding for those around me. On my own, and this is the BIG key to this whole sordid exercise, I arrange my things in such a manner as to make cleaning up as quick and painless as I can. This allows me the most bang for my buck as to my free, non cleaning time. The problem arises when I live with others, and as someone who likes being a family guy, sociable, that means most of the time. Others are not as cognizant of this tension as I am. They are, however, acutely aware of my dislike for disorder, and I believe, more than willing to use this against me for the purposes of getting out of doing their part to maintain the social order.
This, of course, is my fault. While one the one hand, striving to keep the place orderly and thus easy to clean, on the other, I don't weather those who are less inclined to putting their stuff away in a timely manner well. Consequently there is a frisson that continually animates my relationship with others. It has also; and this is the perverse part, rendered my free time, or what would have been my free time, time spent taking care of those things that I should make the others take care of themselves. I hope that makes sense.
The irony is that it took me how many thousands of years to accept this. Fool, heal thyself.
The question then becomes whether my proclivities are doable in an environment filled with others who may not share my sensibilities on this subject. If I strive to fulfill my destiny will I then end up nothing more than a bitter old troll no one wants to visit. That's probably a tad dramatic, as I am generally; at least in this my old age, more sanguine about the nature of my fellow humans and their disregard, whether willful or not. Still, I do dream of my utopia, free of the maelstrom of pilers, droppers, agitators, malcontents, slobs, the mal-formed, and those predisposed to the messy disorganized life. A land content with order and the freedom that provides; even if I'm the only one who appreciates it.
I'm not sure what the future holds, but I can dream. Can't I?
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
And we're doing this because...........
The sun is out, shining down upon the multitudes. White, billowy clouds drift across the horizon, having nothing better to do. The sea laps up against the shore calling with it's cool enticing refreshment.
And you're stuck inside doing what? Paperwork? The same monotonous tasks you perfunctorily perform day in/day out for the privilege of collecting a few bucks to do what? Go home, go to bed, and do it all over again. Perhaps you're more than some cog in the machine: you're important, driven; a man for his times. A man destined for a short blurb in some magazine ( assuming such things still exist in the future ) on his contribution to the archives of human history, a brief summation of many years of toil and whatever else you accomplished before dying. And the rest of us?
You've got to wonder.
Let's step back for a minute. All of us have a finite period of time on this, our mortal coil. Some die young; some live to old age, but all of us perish one day. And the days in between? What of them? They are the sum of our existence, of our experiences, of our time here. Yet how many of us spend those days doing what we like? How many of us delight in a sunny day, the first snow falling softly, the grays of autumn, and the colors of spring? Probably most of us, yet how many of us take the time to do nothing more than revel in it; glorying in being a part of the universe's majesty? Better to spend our time pushing paper, layering the bureaucracy of perpetual motion that seems endemic to business as usual. Assembling obsolescence; to see your labour as no more that throwaways to be ground up in the church of consumerism. To collect and consume, to gather and hoard so that one day our life's joy is disgorged as a collection of things to be disposed of by our children, or worse, by disinterested unknown faces. Are we all manifestations of Charles Foster Kane with our life's possessions thrown into the furnace, afterthoughts of nothing more than objects acquired and now forgotten.
This is not to suggest that everyone is toiling away is obscurity, doomed to a meaningless life. Many people enjoy what they do, and feel their life important and productive. Many, however, do not. Many butt heads with the commercial nature of life in a capitalistic society. Not everyone pines for the all mighty buck. Not everyone finds virtue in having a bigger house, car, fortune, personality, or in the status symbol of the month. Our current economic woes stem from over consumption and massive debt needed to support that consumption. And for what? The fear of losing it all, or being able to make basic payments, or being able to maintain a certain lifestyle, or the illusion of that lifestyle. We've moved from creating things of substance to things of illusion to be discarded when the next big thing comes along. We're judged on what we have, rather than who we are. We don't like to acknowledge that, but it much more prevalent than we'd like to admit.
The punchline, naturally, is; it is what it is. We are the products of our time, as well as the progressions of industrial and personal consumption. The quest for a better life inculcates itself into our subconscious as the norm as we plod through life as we consume as we burn precious after precious minute looking forward to a golden existence of leisure and harmony apart from those obnoxious types who muck up the view. That we work harder, longer for that leisure and harmony into the gray days is an inconvenient truth. Mutterings that our golden retirement will be nothing more than flipping burgers, greeting the fine folks at Wal-Mart waif sweetly on the air. Noting darkly, the dank of hubristic investment bankers wasting our hard earned dollars in complicated scams meant only to enrich the few, the notion of a golden retirement is nothing more than window dressing meant to hide the machine.
There is no idyllic. There's only the days we have. Maybe our caveman ancestors didn't have the greatest of health care option, and no one id thrilled with the idea of being eaten by a bear, but life at it's own natural rhythms has it's charms.
And you're stuck inside doing what? Paperwork? The same monotonous tasks you perfunctorily perform day in/day out for the privilege of collecting a few bucks to do what? Go home, go to bed, and do it all over again. Perhaps you're more than some cog in the machine: you're important, driven; a man for his times. A man destined for a short blurb in some magazine ( assuming such things still exist in the future ) on his contribution to the archives of human history, a brief summation of many years of toil and whatever else you accomplished before dying. And the rest of us?
You've got to wonder.
Let's step back for a minute. All of us have a finite period of time on this, our mortal coil. Some die young; some live to old age, but all of us perish one day. And the days in between? What of them? They are the sum of our existence, of our experiences, of our time here. Yet how many of us spend those days doing what we like? How many of us delight in a sunny day, the first snow falling softly, the grays of autumn, and the colors of spring? Probably most of us, yet how many of us take the time to do nothing more than revel in it; glorying in being a part of the universe's majesty? Better to spend our time pushing paper, layering the bureaucracy of perpetual motion that seems endemic to business as usual. Assembling obsolescence; to see your labour as no more that throwaways to be ground up in the church of consumerism. To collect and consume, to gather and hoard so that one day our life's joy is disgorged as a collection of things to be disposed of by our children, or worse, by disinterested unknown faces. Are we all manifestations of Charles Foster Kane with our life's possessions thrown into the furnace, afterthoughts of nothing more than objects acquired and now forgotten.
This is not to suggest that everyone is toiling away is obscurity, doomed to a meaningless life. Many people enjoy what they do, and feel their life important and productive. Many, however, do not. Many butt heads with the commercial nature of life in a capitalistic society. Not everyone pines for the all mighty buck. Not everyone finds virtue in having a bigger house, car, fortune, personality, or in the status symbol of the month. Our current economic woes stem from over consumption and massive debt needed to support that consumption. And for what? The fear of losing it all, or being able to make basic payments, or being able to maintain a certain lifestyle, or the illusion of that lifestyle. We've moved from creating things of substance to things of illusion to be discarded when the next big thing comes along. We're judged on what we have, rather than who we are. We don't like to acknowledge that, but it much more prevalent than we'd like to admit.
The punchline, naturally, is; it is what it is. We are the products of our time, as well as the progressions of industrial and personal consumption. The quest for a better life inculcates itself into our subconscious as the norm as we plod through life as we consume as we burn precious after precious minute looking forward to a golden existence of leisure and harmony apart from those obnoxious types who muck up the view. That we work harder, longer for that leisure and harmony into the gray days is an inconvenient truth. Mutterings that our golden retirement will be nothing more than flipping burgers, greeting the fine folks at Wal-Mart waif sweetly on the air. Noting darkly, the dank of hubristic investment bankers wasting our hard earned dollars in complicated scams meant only to enrich the few, the notion of a golden retirement is nothing more than window dressing meant to hide the machine.
There is no idyllic. There's only the days we have. Maybe our caveman ancestors didn't have the greatest of health care option, and no one id thrilled with the idea of being eaten by a bear, but life at it's own natural rhythms has it's charms.
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