A man grows bored going to work all day and having the weekends off (if they are lucky) and a woman is sick of being a house wife, feeling like she is not accomplishing much with her life; we call that, "being in a rut". I'm assuming that the saying must come from the ruts found on old Roman roads, just the width of a wagon axle. A straight line to no where, or so they feel. When we work like dogs we want a vacation and when we are on a week-long vacation, we can't wait to get back to work. When we are out for the night, enjoying a dinner and a movie, or perhaps drinks with friends, we can not help but want to get back home. When we are home relaxing, we are already planning our next trip out. Restless, we are.
The Chinese have a proverb, "may you live in interesting times". It is not a good-feeling proverb. The peasants of China know well the feeling of being in a "rut". A hundred generations of field work lay in the pasts of many who descended from Han. They tended to accept their place in society and the world (which is why they do not advance like we do...but that is another blog entry). That proverb was a warning that to disrupt the tranquility of your current life is to invite war, disease, and famine upon your family, your clan, and your village.
Americans of the last few generations think nothing of changing employers every few years and careers every few decades. The GI's and the Boomers get exasperated with the X'ers and the Millennials. The X'ers seek advantage in life while the Millennials seek personal fulfillment. The restlessness grows stronger with each generation. That will have to come to a peak at some time and swing back to the traditional GI and Boomer way of thinking, I suppose. Nature abhors instability. We always want the newest clothes, the newest smart phones, the hottest cars and the best homes. Work becomes a means to provide stuff rather than a means to provide food. In the past, you worked hard to provide food and shelter to your family, now we work hard so that we can give them the best "stuff".
That which is freely taken is just as casually thrown away. When children are given everything they fail to understand its value. When society becomes used to a growing economy, they can not image anything else. They take chances their fathers and mothers would never take, and they make reckless decisions that their grandparents would never make because they lived through, and payed for, the consequences. A good example is the Fed playing around with the idea of inflating our way out of debt. Anyone who have even casually, and I do mean casually, looked over their history of the 1930's can see how that worked out for the Germans. They can see how that worked out for the Argentinians in the 70's and 80's, and Zimbabwe of today. Yet those wizards of smart seem to think that this is best for us. Somehow, the laws of economics will bend for us because we are the United States.
We pray for peace but seem to expect war and conflict. We mark our holidays by when wars began or ended. We even celebrate the taming of the American wilderness with Thanksgiving. We always seem to mark the important events in history with what war ended this or began that. Never the long peace, except for the Pax Imperium, but that is an exception and not the rule.
Peace seems to be a paradox to me. We all crave it, but are just as eager to throw it away. When the fires of war burn us, we seek the solace of peace. When we grow bored with peace, we seek the "invigoration" of war. It is this yin and yang of our nature that seems to drive us as a creative and evolving species, both culturally and biologically. We always want something different in our lives, but all to frequently, someone else has what we want, be it another clan or nation, or even a mountains fastness that is denying us the gold that we desire. Somehow, we adapt, innovate and overcome (meaning that we take what we want). It is our nature. We must recognize this duality about us and learn to work with it if we are to bring some happiness to our lives. Apply yourself when you must, but lay back in the rut from time to time and watch the clouds pass by on the beautiful blue sky.
The Stoa is now available as this Stoic desires to do something else until the next urge to climb upon the Stoa overcomes him.
--Zavost
No comments:
Post a Comment