October 23, 2024
The amount of sunlight we
enjoy each day begins to reduce with the arrival of the summer solstice. That
happens in June – some time between the 20th and the 21st.
It occurs every year. We know that. We accept that. And yet at some point after
September’s leaves have begun to fall, we usually feel surprised—shocked, even—to
discover just how short the days have become.
A lot of life is like that. We
know that certain things happen at certain times. Whether appointed as such
through nature, like the changing seasons and shortening or lengthening of
days, or by mankind’s machinations and inventions—as with holidays and other
moments of note—we know that certain days or dates are coming.
And yet we always feel so amazed
when they’re actually here.
We human beings are a very
strange race, indeed.
We keep doing things the same
way and are miffed when the different results we hope for don’t materialize. A
lot of the time, we simply put one foot in front of the other as we always have
done, and live through the days, the weeks, the months, and the years by rote.
We like a few changes here and
there if they’re happy changes. We like
the odd surprise once in a while, if it’s a nice surprise and doesn’t add to our
stress. But for the most part, we just want to keep doing what we’re doing,
with everything going according to plan and according to schedule. We like to
feel as if we are in control of our lives.
I can’t decide if this is the
way humankind has always been, or if this particular mindset is a natural
outcome of the last decade or so of societal upheaval we’ve experienced.
A part of me argues that this
is not how humankind has always been, nor was it it ever meant to be so. Because if we were always like this, we would
never have ventured out of our caves! We would never have gotten into boats and
sailed across oceans.
And we sure as hell would
never have strapped ourselves to an explosive rocket and soared off into space!
I can recall a time when I
would think about the past, and consider that we, in the modern times called the
twentieth century (yes, way back then), had things so very much easier than our
forbears in pioneer days. Housework was a much larger task in pioneer days and
took far more energy and far more time to complete. Imagine dragging your
carpet out of the house, hoisting over a railing and beating it for several
hours hoping for a semblance of clean.
I sometimes think that if
people living in the 1820s could see our lives in the 2020s, they would scoff at
any notion that any of us would state that life is hard.
And yet it’s all relative, isn’t
it? And I believe that the degree to which we consider our lives to be hard has
much more to do with our “what if’s” than it does with our “what is”.
In pioneer times, the folks
carving their lives out of the sometimes-unforgiving earth had a set of “what
ifs” to worry about that are completely different from the ones we have today.
Our list isn’t helped overly much by the amount of free time, relatively
speaking, that we have. Nor is it helped at all by the technology which
continues to sprout all around us.
But time, as it always has,
continues to march on. So far, we see no reason to believe the sun will not set
today, nor rise tomorrow.
There’s not much else beyond
that, that we can be sure of.
The only thing we can do right
now, and each day, is the best we can do. And the best we can do should be
enough.
Well, that, and prayer.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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