Pearls: What if I could…..

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

What if for one year I could live more like my great-grandparents?

What if I ate food that we had prepared at home, or when I did eat at a restaurant, I ate at someplace locally owned, operated by folks who were living their lives in my community?

What if I got up and went to bed with the sun?

What if I treated candy bars or lice cream like rarities – special treats for special occasions, rather than impulse purchases when I get bored?

What if I more frequently had to swing an axe or throw a square bale? What if I made 4 a.m. trips to the barn to milk a Jersey cow?

What if I made my living in my community, then spent all that I possibly could in that same hometown?

What if I made it a point to play pitch with my neighbor on a quiet evening? What if my family in general spent more time having the kind of fun that doesn’t come with a price tag?

What if I put down my phone? What if I treated it like an emergency device, rather than my social media connection to a world full of people most of whom I only marginally care about?

What if I saved money and paid for things I could afford?

What if I put on a suit, tie and hat to go to the office each day? What if my practice of wearing dressier clothing was more of a reflection of how much I value my career?

What if I reused as much as I could and threw away as little as possible?

What if I treated my vehicle like my great-grandpa cared for his cars?

What if I kept my life as simple as possible? What if I owned fewer things and watched fewer channels? What if we kept only water, tea and milk in the fridge?

What if for one year I could live more like my great-grandparents?

Answer: I can. I just don’t.

We did this to ourselves. We chose to live conveniently rather than simply. We decided to live the fast-food life, an existence where we are sprinting continually to the next moment, and the next and then the next.

We chose to buy more than we need, and then we throw the excess away. We eat too much, then we take selfies and call ourselves heroes when we diet or exercise to lose a few pounds.

We dress like we’re headed to a backyard barbeque when we’re actually going to work.

We pay admission fees for all our fun and neglect our relationships with our neighbors.

We take our resources away from our hometowns and pump the into larger communities who aren’t happy to welcome us – and would never miss us if we disappeared.

And at the end of a wasteful day of self-indulgence, we dive into our phones and shut out the world around us.

But all is not lost. We have the time and means to take back our lives. All it takes is a moderate helping of advice from a generation that is gone from this world.

We can focus on not being wasteful, upon enjoying simple, affordable pleasures in our lives.

We can care for our possessions, and we can care for our home communities by spending our time and money within them.

We can put our stupid phones down. I curse the day I ever saw mine.

We can value quality over quantity – in our clothing and with all of our possessions.

Imagine what the next year would bring our little towns if all of us made a pact and stuck to it:

What if for one year we lived more like our great-grandparents?

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.