The flyer in my mailbox read: “Because life is too busy to waste time cleaning your own home.” And it pictured a happy team of immigrants busily cleaning a modern middle-class McMansion while the equally happy homeowners helpfully tutored their children with all that extra time on their hands.
Alas, experience teaches us that the extra time afforded those homeowners will be put toward pursuits that ultimately – and unconsciously – will lead to more time pressures. It’s perhaps the greatest of modern ironies: the harder we work toward maximizing efficiencies and saving time, the harder we have to work to afford those labor-saving strategies.
The horse was too slow so we moved to the horseless carriage and today great masses of humanity sit cut off from each other in great metal vehicles crawling toward their offices and factories of efficiency.
Paper and pencil were happily replaced by typewriters that were replaced by that ultimate of labor-saving devices, the computer, and now most of us are digitally connected in a 24/7 race to squeeze out a 25th hour of the day.
We fret endlessly about our children and the myriad pressures placed upon them, rarely stopping to consider that our children are little more than conditioned replicas of ourselves, only a little faster, a little more efficient (well, maybe not the teenagers, not just yet). “What is wrong with little Johnny or Susie?” we ask each other on cell phones as we race from one appointment to another.
I watch the UPS deliveryman and trash collectors race each other up the street each morning, one bringing in what George Carlin would call the “new stuff” while the other takes out the old, both sides literally sprinting from house to house so that their corporate brand managers can boast of on-time efficiencies.
That ad for house cleaning services summoned memories of what a friend told me some years ago: “Americans can’t find time to vacuum their own carpets but they’re going to run off and save the world from itself.” This was a friend, mind you, who was helping lift me (and others) from the existential crisis caused in no small part by the insanity of human existence. “The best thing you can do is save yourselves, but you’re all too busy to find time to do that.”
Indeed, we are working so feverishly toward what, exactly? What is the end game? Retirement? Then what? Fame? Fortune? Family? What is it really all about? What’s the point of the race?
Most mystical teachings, religious scripture, etc., repeatedly remind us not to worry about tomorrow, that tomorrow will take care of itself. Instead we are encouraged to know ourselves, to immerse ourselves in long periods of contemplative silence, to love, to grow, to consider the lilies of the fields. But how do we do that in a world that can’t sit still? How do we find time to discover the truth within when the world without is demanding so much from us, nights and weekends too?
I think, maybe, the answer lies in surrender. In acknowledging that I really have no clue what is going on and that the Power that is will lead the way if I but get out of my own way. That maybe if I let go of the voices seeking to panic me about retirement or work or college funds and instead I pick up the guitar for awhile or simply sit in silence and watch the trees gently arcing in the wind, the rest will simply take care of itself. Maybe my kids will see me just sitting there, watching a suburban sunset, the television off, the window open, and just maybe it will occur to them that life can indeed be lived outside of Facebook. Or maybe I can mop my own damned floor just for the joy of cleaning up my own mess.
