Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Tents of life
Living in a tent...it's something not everyone does. Yet those who do or have in the past understand the reality of simple pleasures. Water, food, being clean...and yes, the thought is again of people "down on their luck" or experiencing "hard luck". Not "campers" who have someplace else they can go.
When times are tough there has always been alternatives. It's just that we make living so hard that if we must endure greater hardships than we "expect" we feel sorry for ourselves instead of seeing the moment for what it is. We call "unfair" only because we compare our lives we've made so hard with other lives. Sure some people want to give up living for whatever reason, but those who can embrace the alternatives seem to have a resilience at their core.
On the other end of this spectrum, consider the workers on the Hoover Dam who went to work for $4 bucks a day (even in 1931 this was not a lot.) They got used to the wage, they pushed themselves harder at their jobs for small raises and to prove their worth. Getting themselves and their families out of the Hoovervilles or tent cities seem to mean the work provided a better life. As if there was shame in living in tents.
The tragedy then is not that a man dies but that he fought so hard to stay alive.
We fight today to stay alive when perhaps we should instead just fight to live.
Live as in being so present in the moment we don't see work as work. We see our needs, we live our needs so our wants become these needs. And we thus circle back to the simple pleasures of food, water, being clean...
When times are tough there has always been alternatives. It's just that we make living so hard that if we must endure greater hardships than we "expect" we feel sorry for ourselves instead of seeing the moment for what it is. We call "unfair" only because we compare our lives we've made so hard with other lives. Sure some people want to give up living for whatever reason, but those who can embrace the alternatives seem to have a resilience at their core.
On the other end of this spectrum, consider the workers on the Hoover Dam who went to work for $4 bucks a day (even in 1931 this was not a lot.) They got used to the wage, they pushed themselves harder at their jobs for small raises and to prove their worth. Getting themselves and their families out of the Hoovervilles or tent cities seem to mean the work provided a better life. As if there was shame in living in tents.
The tragedy then is not that a man dies but that he fought so hard to stay alive.
We fight today to stay alive when perhaps we should instead just fight to live.
Live as in being so present in the moment we don't see work as work. We see our needs, we live our needs so our wants become these needs. And we thus circle back to the simple pleasures of food, water, being clean...
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