Creative
Recovery
“Rest
when you are weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind,
your spirit. Then get back to work.”
Ralph
Marston
My
short sojourn at the lake is over and I am home to a very soggy
Birmingham, refreshed and ready to get back to work. For a while,
when I need to feel inspired, I will remember the gray lake, shrouded
in mist, and the loon-song floating across the water like carillon
bells. For me, three days is the perfect amount of time to relax. Any
less than that and I don't slow down, any more, and I get fidgety.
We
Americans underestimate the value of down-time. We go and go and go,
and then wonder why we feel so tired. “I'm really pooped,” we
say, and then move on to the next task. I think it must come from all
the decades of assembly line work we did. If you aren't constantly on
task in a manufacturing setting, you don't make your quota and your
pay is docked. I remember when my aunt worked for Buster Brown,
sewing identical seams into thousands of identical garments. She was
good, and she had many mouths to feed, so she achieved above quota
regularly. When she did, they would change her to a different seam,
or a different garment just to slow her down. I think about her when I hear of textile
factories in China.
Americans
have cellular memory of that period in our history. We were
productive and proud. Many of us think that we need to return to an
economy based on manufacturing. I happen to be one of those people. I
know there are down sides to it—the first time I saw Birmingham,
she looked a little like Beijing. The air was hard to breath, and
your eyes stayed red all the time. Steel mills ringed the city and
cranked out smoke twenty-four hours per day. The little mountain town
where I grew up was a manufacturing hub for furniture and textiles.
People had jobs that may have been less than ideal, but they put food
on the table, and the quality of the products that we produced was
far superior to what we import today.
I
know. There's no going backward. Still, I think we are ingenious
enough to come up with new products to produce in America. My cousin,
Jerry, is an inventor, with multiple patents. His newest handy gadget
is called the PushNPutt; it pops balls up out of the cup on a putting
green, so you don't have to reach down and dig your golf balls out of
the hole. He has established several small industries and continues
to be creative and productive. I know there are other Americans like
him. I read in the Sunday paper that many out-of-work people over
fifty, are resorting to creative endeavors to earn money in this down
economy. The recession may be the very thing that gets us back to the
firm ground of our ingenuity. Silver lining, y'all, silver lining!
We've been refreshed, and now we're ready to get back to work!
In
the spirit,
Jane
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