Thursday October 30, 2008 | 1 comment
Take Time to Work: It is the path to patience and success
Our world has taken many of us away from the essential life work of providing for ourselves: gardening; mending fence; cooking and preserving food; caring for domestic animals; gathering wild foods; sewing and mending our own clothes, cutting and stacking our own firewood – and the list goes on. Most of us work indoors – manufacturing goods, or at a computer console, or preparing for the being needs (food, clothing, shelter) of others; or teaching/preaching; or providing healthcare services. Instead of providing for ourselves, we work for cash to exchange for the goods and services we require.
The need to actively exercise is another outgrowth of this movement away from working for ourselves. People who do hard physical labor day in and day out need little in the way of treadmill time, and they invariably sleep well and eat heartily. They suffer fewer of the maladies of the sedentary life – obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.
Take Time to Work, it is the path to patience and success. Endurance of the heart/mind is patience. Get outside and sweat for your family and for yourself. There is no satisfaction that quite matches the satisfaction that comes from labor that directly provides for our needs. And after you have worked up a satisfactory sweat, retire to a favorite chair to enjoy a cup of rewarding and replenishing tea. Golden Lion’s Paw; Assam; or Morning Dew all do a body good.
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This was just beautiful. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Parts of me greatly appreciate the ‘luxuries’ of the internet, ready-made foods at the market, and work-out DVD’s to help me exercise, but at the same time I feel like I would do a great service to my sense of self-sufficiency & peace of mind if I just got away from it all for a while. I mean, I appreciate that I have access to these conveniences & instant lines of communication, but at the same time I wonder who the heck I would be & what I would do if I wasn’t constantly on-the-go.
I read a great quote the other day…something along the lines of, ‘We spend $50 a month on a gym membership to perform difficult tasks on heavy metal machines that imitate the manual labor that we were so glad to get rid of with the start of the Industrial Revolution.’ So true!
Now, in this new information era of computers & convenience & drive-through lifestyles, we’ve completely forgotten what it means to reap the fruits of our own labor. If a worldwide crisis occured & somehow we all had to mend for ourselves, who the heck would know how to grow their own food? Or build shelter? Who would even have enough energy to walk to the next town over? We are so catered-to in this country!