Still hoping for self-improvement

Matt Pearl

There are times when I look at we civilized folk and wonder to myself, “Are we too soft?”

By that, I mean if everything went down the tubes — if civilization as we know it fell to pieces, if our conveniences were gone, our energy sources disrupted, our indoor plumbing nonexistent — could we survive?

Some of you could. Some of you have intentionally sought ways to get away from civilization and the headaches of the digital age. Some of you have wells from which your water comes. Some of you are the people the rest of us would be begging for help if doomsday came.

But many of us are indeed soft, myself included. I like my conveniences — yet a part of me sometimes wishes that, just for a few days, perhaps, I were forced to live without an iPhone or even my television set.

When I think on these things, I respect the generations that went before.

Think about how tough we think we have things, keeping bills paid and getting kids raised.

Now imagine doing it all without a refrigerator, relying on vegetable yields from the garden and the viability of livestock to keep everyone fed.

Some of you have lived that way. I fear that many of us of later generations have been able completely to avoid the need to put in such work for our daily bread.

When I look at my garden at home, a weed bed that serves as an eyesore reminder of my agricultural failures, I make excuses:

It was too wet this year. Nobody has a good garden. My office hours make gardening impossible. The bugs have been bad. How do you keep raccoons out of it when you live in the country?

You get the point. I try to blame a bad garden on bad soil and bad weather. But you know as well as I that if we truly relied upon the garden as a major source of our food, I would have tried a little harder, been more vigilant about caring for it.

When you have a TV, you’ll watch it.

If you buy a tablet or a computer, you’ll use it.

If you own a car long enough, you’ll find yourself driving it even short distances.

It’s our nature.

So sometimes I make plans with myself to go off the grid for a few days. Every spring, I say to myself that I’ll garden with greater voracity, treating the plants growing there as if their bounty were a necessary part of our food supply.

Then, somehow, I fall of that wagon and revert to the life of convenience.

There’s just no help for me, I guess.

Still, in my hopes for self-improvement, I hold the ideal that I can be a bit more subsistent. The world is full of what-if’s, but the possibility that we could someday have to re-learn to live on less with fewer conveniences is one that lingers in my mind.

I read once that necessity is the mother of invention.

I suppose if that day were to come, and our technology failed to serve us, that we would find ways to survive.

It’s funny: some of us who sit as desks and get to be the know-it-alls sometimes these days might find ourselves the first to beg others from help and expertise.

I also know that, historically, in times that are the hardest, good folks find ways to band together.

When a person gives up a meal so that another can eat, I’d say that defines true generosity, wouldn’t you?