News & Articles

Felician Sisters Glomar and Mary Catherine Stormtrooper would have said with little hesitation “This boy is lazy.”

True. I was an avoider of seemingly (to me) useless or empty work. While the good nuns had a point, so did I. Though they didn’t see it, I saw utilitarian value in my brand of laziness.

Good grief, this sounds godawful already. But relief arrives because by laziness I mean a simple scheme for starting an investigation. What’s that mean, please tell. I will.

For the sake of an easy beginning for almost any topic of interest we can see two basic choices. These are the active and the passive. An active role or life is one that produces. You are active if, for example, you produce something, such as (keeping things simple) firewood. Passive is, as I’m doing, talking about producing firewood.

The active perspective recognizes and strives to show a product as a goal or result. So, the two possibilities or conditions boil down to those who DO it and those who TALK about it.

Simple, eh, but so what?

Well, for example, consider how many people, some very important and well known, produce nothing. Talking about firewood gives zero wood to burn. Talking about the best plan on the planet for world peace doesn’t assure anything because there are a whole lot of folks not in the conversation.

Can any of us count that high or devise a way to gain cooperation of many-many, many millions? Even the loudest most persuasive voice will not convince all nor will it do anything much beyond stir people up.

The biggest people gathering we might imagine does not produce anything, no more, say, than watching the greatest show on earth produces anything. Well no. That’s wrong. There’ll be lots of trash to collect afterward and many a porta pot to haul away.

Activity we often see as democratic is very often little more than a collective waste of time talking about things we have no control over and very likely couldn’t handle if we did.

Here’s where the laziness route comes into its own. If we’re talking about doing something that is essentially impossible, then why not recognize that at the start and instead do or tackle what we can? In my case making the world a better place is no more or less than picking up some trash as I make my way to the Post Office.

Am I going to change your mind this way? No, and I hope not. If your way follows another route, then so be it. But for heaven’s sake, I hope that route doesn’t require me to be on it as well. I’m busy, you see, picking up the odd bit of trash where I am. Lazy, not far sighted, not idealistic, but gets some trash picked up. As I’m wont to say, good enough is good enough.

The nuns who flogged this boy for being lazy (OK, I was often remiss about math tables) meant well, not so much for the world at large but for one lazy little bugger who should complete his homework. In other words, a modest goal. Get after one lazy boy, not an entire class, not all and every or any other impossibility. Why reach for more when one impossible homework skipper was already more than enough?

Where would effort best be put? Should we rally to reform education or see if we can get kiddo X to improve their math?

If you’ve followed along you’ll note one of those options while sounding grand is least productive. HMMM, how easily we get drawn to impossibilities by people too lazy to pick up litter or talk to a little kid about their math block.

To me, a known blockhead, the easy, lazy way is doing something I can in fact do. I used to contribute to an overseas education project (possibly makes me a terrible colonizer) but the money involved was, I’m sure, by far less important than the monthly letter I’d write telling someone in the Sudan about snow or the same for a student in South Asia. The letter and effort were the real contribution.

In comparison, giving Danny Thomas another $10 is fine, but it’s really not doing much, is it?

An active (and I suspect happy) life seems to me intrinsically more positive and satisfying than reaching for the stars and always and forever destined to not only fail but be defeated.

Great lives and good are ones that accomplish deeds, large and small, along the way. Famous lives often leave little behind beyond ambition.

It once was, I suspect, a role of religion to separate the known from the unknown or unknowable. Do I know God? Nope. Can’t and very likely won’t. Why? Haven’t I explained already? Impossible to know the unknowable. Know that and things settle in a bit.

Don’t have to have an answer for damn near everything. I don’t know is a valid reply. Maybe I thought my ideas of politics, economics or belief were solid as steel. Then I saw kids in Dakar jumping among moving vehicles to sell their snacks, gadgets and so on. They, far more than I, I’m suspicious, were alive in ways beyond and not including a single damn thing I was thinking.

Easy to forget that being alive, that living is doing. Talking up National Broccoli Day is unlikely to make much difference to minds or habits. Inflating the place of broccoli will not make that vegie much more or less than it is.

In one of my work roles a sales person would proudly say, “I just sold such and such house.” Inflating one’s work or contribution comes through talk, not product.

For my part I liked to act my part. I never sold a house. I did, however, help people to buy a house. The difference or distinction is important. Such as, if going about my daily life I pick up some trash and keep the front of my place tidy

I believe those small acts are more about community than the longest article or best speech I could make on the topic.