Tag Archives: contentment

Taking the Time to Live a Longer Life

Musings from the bus stop.

The journey begins pleasantly enough. I walk down the lane, leaves crunching underfoot. First I crunch through a collection of maple leaves which are satisfyingly crispy even after yesterday’s drizzle.

Next, my feet wade into a sea of yellow heart-shaped leaves. It is the cottonwoods, whose pleasant fragrance reaches me before I see the first impossibly tall trunk. Looking up, I realize our lane winds through a copse of these giant grandmother cottonwoods. Large and wise they tower above. I have driven this lane a thousand times and never noticed them dancing alongside the pavement, ensconced as I was in an aluminum, plastic, and steel cage.

I am disappointed in myself, but also thrilled to have finally made their discovery.

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Let’s Defund the Billionaires

I’m robbing them of my life energy, and you can, too!

You have heard it said before: if you don’t know what they are selling, then the product is you. Your attention, your custom, your life energy.

Does the Zuck care if you are there for pictures of your nephew or to find out about community happenings? No. The point is to get your eyes on the screen, your fingers scrolling, your brain reeling with things to buy or to believe or to fund.

Angry, sad, dissatisfied? Good, the easier it is to sell you and sell your wallet to the highest bidder.

Does Walmart and Kroger care that you simply want to feed your family a wholesome meal? No, they want your life energy to come to them via impulse buys, in store or in app, and they will tempt you with corn syrup, sugar, and bright colors so that you buy, buy, buy until you die, die, die.

As far as I can tell, we only get this one life. I want it to be my own, to live and to share with those that love me back. Not to sell, unknowing and unwilling, to a billionaire class that can never have enough until they learn what it is like to have too little.

Greed is nothing more than addiction under a different name, and none are greedier than a would-be oligarch that is rarely told no.

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Why I Am Done With Human Domestication

Are you a tame, wild, or domesticated animal?

Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

The half acre of land that makes up my front yard is a mixture of lawn grasses, invasive plants, and native flora. Each morning, a menagerie of native mule and white-tailed deer, robins, and douglas squirrels commune and compete with introduced eastern gray squirrels, barred owls, and wild turkeys.

All are wild, although some of the mule deer and douglas squirrels are tamed due to their own choices and human meddling.

I, on the other hand, am domesticated. Uneasily I pace within the cage, both this physical home with window sizes and wall heights prescribed by international building codes, and the psychological home of for-profit work, infinite growth economics, and modern constructs of the good and proper life.

Inside, I am a wild animal, willing to be tamed but chafing at the bit of forced domestication.

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Happiness Will Ruin Your Life

Choose contentment and you choose life.

Photo by Timothy Rose on Unsplash

26 years ago Irvine Welsh’s Choose Life Monologue from his book Trainspotting made it’s movie debut:

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

And, like so many before and after me, that’s exactly what I set about doing.

Although Welsh was writing about the heroin epidemic destroying Edinburgh, these words perfectly sum up the American dream that was piped into my house via Friday Night Laugh Packs and Saturday Morning Cartoons throughout my 1980s childhood. It was the same dream, now upsized, that was sold to my parents in the decades following the wars that DIDN’T end all wars.

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