Saturday, January 31, 2009

Weekends

The weekend is great, isn't it? We get to live a normal life once Friday afternoon rolls around, and we can enjoy it until wiping the sleep from our eyes at some unnatural hour to get ready for work on Monday. What a luxury to awake and find that daylight has actually arrived! The bizarre routine of stumbling around in the dark so we can go do something that we are generally reasonably good at in order to receive some sort of electronic notice that we can purchase things for another month can't be the plan of the worker bees, can it?

How nice to hear sounds of an awakening world: An increasing chorus of warbles and coos from exotic birds, the shuffle of feet carrying folks to the corner in order to give alms to the monks, the swish of broom on pavement to clear last night's leaf fall, the hum of bicycle tires on the street, the voice of neighbor to neighbor across the wall. In our hurry to get to our place of employment, we so often miss life's simple pleasures, finding ourselves closed up away from nature and the sounds of human interactions. How unfortunate that we don't slow enough until Saturday to truly enjoy what it means to relax and live in the moment.

Of course, our busy work week means that we very often have to scurry around on weekends to get done what we have no time for during the week, or are simply too tired to complete once we get home and flop onto the couch. For thirty or forty years we miss the beauty of life because we just don't take the time. I can think of no good reason why one cannot have one day of rest for every day of work. Maybe sanity and good health are not what our leaders want in a work force. Come to think of it, being tired and glued to TV commercials is probably what a corporate economy needs, so we save up our desires for the weekend shopping spree. Hanging out at a park or going for a walk in the woods won't help make millionaires of our financial elite.

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