[New Year, New You] Day 7: The Joy of Dirty Fingernails
We’re one third of the way through our 21-Day New Year, New You Challenge, and our goal now is to keep things more practical than theoretical. The most valuable people in life are not necessarily the ones with loud voices, sophisticated vocabularies or thick books credited to their name. There are many people who do a lot of thinking about how to make life work, and many more who who do a lot of talking, this blog post is dedicated to the ones who, in the midst of struggle or strife quietly rolled up their sleeves and got busy doing whatever it took to make life work.
Today’s podcast and blog article are dedicated to the dirty fingernails of the world–the ones whose blood, sweat and tears spill getting things done, while others spend time talking about it. This is a message for action-takers–the ones who aren’t afraid to get a little messy trying to make life go right, and who know that making life go right doesn’t just mean “when you feel like it,” or “when it’s convenient for you,” but when the going gets tough and it’s rough and wild and a little scary!
Take a Seat and Make Yourself Uncomfortable
We’re presented, for the first time in known history, with a whole new culture where an ever-present exposure to media and an onslaught of highly provocative visual imagery can hold (and keep) our attention hostage for hours and hours a day. This attention trap is keeping an increasing number of otherwise capable and productive people distracted, overstimulated and unproductive.
When you add to this attention-sucking trap, lowered levels of literacy, a compromised state of physical health, increased exposure to harmful, environmental toxins, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fungicides, suicides, ADHD and autism, we are leading ourselves directly into a swamp of stupidity and long-term suffering.
If your life is as pleasurable as the size of your obstacles, then how many obstacles do you really get by swiping and clicking and dropping and dragging stuff on an electronic clipboard?
If we feel alive by reaching out and making things happen, then how much can our confidence and happiness really improve if we’re stuck sitting in our chairs or desks zoning in to the computer screen and checking out of life in the real world.
It might seem comfortable to sit there on your electronic device, but the rapidly increasing rates of depression and anxiety in teens indicate it’s not that comfortable? There was a day when children were supposed to be “seen, but not heard” and now that that day has come to a large degree, and I gotta say, I hate it.
I like the noisy, rule-breakers and trouble-makers! They make life fun–they make life feel ALIVE!
Where Did All the Church Picnics Go?
I bet I was Laura Ingalls Wilder in a past life. I loooved Little House on the Prairie, and I still try to model many aspects of my life around that that way of living. It was such a physically engaged existence. People had their jobs and everyone depended on one another to make things happen. That sense of being needed, productive and knowing your place as a valuable member of the family and community is SO fundamentally important to our well-being in life.
And many of us we don’t really have that kind of environment any more. I live in a building with 23 floors and it’s rare that people talk to each other in the hallways or elevators. I don’t have clue about whose in my “neighbourhood.” I don’t even know more than one of the families on this floor!!
A hundred years ago, we gathered as neighbours, community or church members for something better than shopping and eating. We came together to be together and we shared a moral compass and ethical agreements about the way life worked. Smaller communities with tighter relationships meant more accountability for our personal connections with one another.
When you had to pass Mrs. Jones in the street the next day, you wanted to hold your head high. As we have fallen away from more community-oriented living and moved into the faster paced, “each to their own” model of society, a lot of the system of checks and balances fell away.
We couldn’t get away with being disrespectful to our elders or stealing from the candy store very easily. Mrs. Jones would most certainly find out, who would mention it to Mr. Smith, and Mr. Smith worked with your father, so you knew you were busted before you even bothered making trouble. It was better to just get on with life, keep busy and mind your manners.
The general flavour of the times was “get busy, be honest and work hard,” so the opportunities for distraction and overstimulation were significantly reduced. There was a far greater sense of community and interconnectedness that prevented people from withdrawing from life, or slipping through the cracks as easily.
“Go outside. Don’t tell anyone and don’t bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don’t try to get anything out of it, because you won’t. Don’t try to make use of it, because you can’t. And that’s the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy. There’s a whole world out there, right outside your window. You’d be a fool to miss it.”
― Charlotte Eriksson
Give Me Back the Good Ol’ Days!
As more and more automation has come into our lives, a lot of that hard sweat-producing work has moved out. We may spend more time “together” and at home with our kids, but we’re more depressed and anxious than ever before, too. It’s not helping us feel more confident, engaged, optimistic, etc.
I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but life was a whole lot better back in the “good ol’ days.” When I was growing up, we had talk of nuclear threat, watched the Gulf War happen on TV, and pesticides and processed foods were already sneaking their way into our homes, but relative to today’s youth, we had one thing going for us–way more time outside!
I remember hours spent in barns, picking strawberries with my mom in the garden, and gathering berries in the backwoods near mountains. We ate meals with ingredients from our family garden, and for a long time my mom baked her own bread and cinnamon buns! A “treat” was when my Grandpa slipped us a peppermint during church (he’d keep a few hidden in his pockets to help him stay awake during the sermon). Back in my “good ol’ days” there was nowhere near the massive amount of sugar, processed food, pesticides, preservatives or genetically modified meals we hear about today.
TV had stations and schedules. The good shows were only on after supper or on the weekend. Once you had your fix of MacGyver or Little House on the Prairie, you had to wait another week to see the next episode. The Sunday night Disney movie was always a family affair, and we snuggled in with snacks to make it special. Today, each person in the family isolates themselves on their own electronic device within the walls of the same home so they can watch what they want when they want to watch it.
There’s no schedule or station limitations to keep people connected to one another in the real world.
Why Broken Bones are Better Than Broken Spirits
The ability to constantly stimulate ourselves with the distractions of electronic vibrations just wasn’t possible, so we got busy with the less hypnotic, but far more active, healthy and engaging aspects of everyday life. We turned off the TV and went outside to make snow forts, help in the garden and ride our bikes around the block. We spent time in playgrounds, parks and playing dress up. At night, when the prescheduled selection of sponsored television shows were finished, the TV went off. Children of my generation will remember the multi-coloured screen that came on at the end of the night when broadcasting corporations expected the world to go to sleep.
There were no iPads, iPods or ever-present electronic devices inviting us to succumb to hypnotic distraction and lose our sense of time for a while. We were outside getting our fingernails dirty, and the trouble we got ourselves into was scraped knees, broken bones or being grabbed by the scruff of our neck for stealing candy from the convenience store! We got a swift swat to the backside, were sent to our rooms, and back in my “good ol’ days,” that was enough to handle most of the trouble we could get ourselves into.
Socially we used to have more boundaries, too. On Sundays, most town shops closed because people were committed to church, community and family activities. Over time, the greedy need for more shopping opportunities moved in, and boundaries that protected and prioritized family and community moved out. One of our biggest tasks in the weeks to come will be to re-establish some boundaries, because “society” isn’t going to do it for you, anymore. Facebook won’t sacrifice their advertising sales to help your kids sleep.
There are no more coloured screens coming up to tell you it’s time to go to bed, and stores don’t close on Sunday.
Careful Not to Choke When You Swallow Other People’s Ideas!
We’re quick to swallow headlines on newspapers and magazines and believe what we’re told. We subscribe to the version of world events as they’re told to us, believe in all the bad news, and religiously subscribe to the latest health gurus. We don’t ever really think about checking our facts or doing our own research on most topics before we take a big gulp of the information we’re fed and swallow it up whole, the regurgitate it again as enthusiastic rants to our friends and family.
As long as what you know is based on what you hear and what other people tell you, rather than your own hard yards of personal observation, it will be easy to convince you of just about anything. But once you’ve learned something by personal experience and hard work, no one can ever take that understanding of life away from you.
There’s too much money to be made keeping you and your family distracted with shopping and hopping from one website to another. So you are going to need to muscle up some personal discipline and work with me in the weeks to come to clearly establish your family’s values, goals and responsibilities, so we can put boundaries in place to protect them.
You’re going to need to step up and take a little more control of the situation if you don’t want “the situation” to end up controlling you!
Today’s threats upon our children and ourselves are far more devious than they were when I was growing up. It’s not broken bones we need to worry about, but broken homes and broken spirits. It’s not stolen candy, but stolen attention and stolen minds. Our parents worried we would crash our bikes, break our necks, or encounter some physical form of danger for playing where we shouldn’t.
Today, while our children sit under our very noses, in our own homes, the things they can expose themselves to and the dangers they can fall prey to are far, far more sinister and difficult to mend than broken arms. You can easily heal a broken arm, but it takes a whole lot more to mend a broken spirit or heal the effects of a broken home.
So get outside and get busy. Dig ditches, climb mountains, mow lawns, plant flowers and shake hands with the people you meet. Keep your eyes up and your phone off a lot more often. If you want a great life you have to make it happen, and that means dirty fingernails and rosy-cheeks and a lot more time outside. The accompanying podcast for today’s blog post for today will help and it can be found here!
Love,
Tera