Gratitude

     

The problem with fear is that it keeps you from appreciating how miraculous life is and how blessed you are. The time spent fearing and distrusting your fellow man is time not spent appreciating how they make your life not only better but possible. When you break things down into “us” and “them” then you fail to feel the gratitude you should for what they do for you.

     And make no mistake, gratitude is a wonderful feeling, as well as being an essential element for spiritual health. You cannot feel happy without feeling gratitude, one flows naturally from the other. And if you are incapable of gratitude, you will never know happiness.

     Some people are do-it-yourselfers, and I respect and admire that. I wish I was the kind who could build my own garage, re-wire my house, or grow my own food. But even the most self-sufficient of us requires the fruits of other people’s labor. Even those living out in the wilderness have with them possessions that were made by others, perhaps on the other side of the world.

     From time to time I might find myself lying in bed and aware of all of the work that has gone into the building of the house my wife and I am fortunate enough to call our own. I assure you that such an awareness brings a greater sense of gratitude than were my home a palace. Not only have people I never met put together the walls from timber and drywall, someone has cut down the trees so that other people at a mill might fashion the wood into proper building material. People have installed plumbing and electrical items whose component parts come from all corners of the world. Somebody mined the copper, somebody shipped it, while others transformed it into the wires that lay hidden within the walls and bring to me the miracle of electricity that is possible because of the people working at the power plant, using coal that was mined in Kentucky coal mines and shipped to us up Lake Michigan. And let us not forget those who repair the wires that bring the electricity to our houses, those who create the appliances it powers, etc.

     You see, we are incredibly interdependent. And we are all part of an immensely complex system. Even those who do not seem to contribute are still a part of it. And before we judge those we believe are not contributing sufficiently to the greater good, perhaps we should first ask ourselves if we are adequately rewarding those who do so much for us? Are we providing those who give us life-sustaining food an adequate piece of a pie that is large enough to provide for all? Is their work not as vital as any, and if so should they not be compensated accordingly? Not only those who own the land and the equipment but those who work long hours in the field. There are many working long hours in developing nations to provide the clothes and electronics we feel is our rightful payment for the work we do, and yet those individuals are not driving around in new cars. Often, they do not even have adequate shoes to walk where they need to get.

     But instead of appreciation for those who provide so much for us, we often fear and judge those whom we believe may be taking from us. When I think of all those who have worked to build the house I have, the books I read and music I listen to, gratitude takes the place of fear. Fear is a self-indulgence we cannot afford. And by fear I include hatred, for hatred is just a reaction of the fearful to those they fear.

     We are all in this together whether we like it or not. We are all going to survive because we have found a way to live together or we will perish because we have not. Demagogues try and turn one against the other, always for the benefit of a few who profit from all. It is our job not only to do the work that brings us our daily bread and the bounty we sometimes fail to appreciate, but to ensure that others who do their job are taken care of as well. That is what gratitude is all about, and it is not a burden but a source of joy. Life would not be so sweet nor rich without it.

The Fifteen Hour Work Week

“With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labour more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody.”

     This was written in 1905 by Jack London, a hundred ten years ago.

     What has happened since then? Mankind has invented the airplane. He has invented the cartridge pen and later the ball point pen. He has invented the electric typewriter, the word processor and now the computer. Where it once took weeks for news to circle the world we can now receive it almost instantly. Documents that once needed to travel by rail, by ship and by horse and buggy are now zipped by satellites effortlessly and instantly.

     And the machines of industry have increased almost unbelievably as well. The machine I now operate is twice as efficient as the one I used to operate, is ten times more efficient than the ones in the memories of people I work with. Easily, production has increased tenfold since the time Jack London wrote those words, proclaiming that there was no need for able bodied workers to work more than two or three hours a day. That should put our workday at somewhere between 12 and 18 minutes.

     So what has happened since then? How did we go from a married man working 50-60 hours a week to a couple averaging 100 hours or more a week?

     There are the labor saving devices we have to pay for, I’ll give you that. A washer and a dryer, dishwashers and garage door openers save us some time working at home. But they save physical labor, the kind that is healthy and for the most part stress relieving. Because we now sit at desks for 50 hours a week instead of doing physical labor, we now have to run to the gym after our 10 hour work day and get a workout in. So in the long run our riding lawn mowers and our snow blowers have not really saved us any time.

     What has happened to us since then? How did we end up a society that pays someone to walk our dogs so we can drive our SUVs to the gym to hit the treadmill for an hour? How did we get here from there?

     Sure, we all have televisions nowadays. Really big ones. But a hundred years ago, people would go out to see a play or sit on the porch and talk to our neighbors as they happened by, or played cards with parents or children. Was that a good trade we made?

     Granted we have food from all over the world now, and we can eat the most tropical of fruits in the middle of winter. But very few of us now have grandma’s preserves sitting on our shelves. Very few of us eat vegetables picked fresh from the gardens we or someone we know lovingly tended. Very few of us would even know how to raise food from the ground. Very few of us would know how to prepare an animal, to either raise livestock or hunt for our own dinner.

     We’ve lost something and I don’t know how we let it happen. And we’re all in such a hurry to get things done, I’m worried we’ll never find the time to wonder how it all went wrong. Life should be better than this. We should demand the benefits that our labor saving devices have supposedly given us. We should be humans again, take time to smell the roses, spend time with those we love, do the things that are worth doing and ask the questions that need to be asked:

     So once again I ask you--if you can find the time to come up with an answer—what happened?