Real
Life
“A
lot of people do not suffer from depression; they suffer with the reality of
how we live.”
Keanu
Reeves
Watching
the news last night, I saw a segment on the shortages in the supply chain.
China is struggling with the omicron variant and being forced to close factories
and ports because of worker shortages. The reporter said that it now takes 110
days to ship something from China to the US. And, because American consumerism
has not diminished but only increased during the pandemic, that means there
will be even longer wait times for the things we order. That sent the people I
was watching with into torrents of complaints levied at the Chinese!
One of
the items shown on the show as being in short supply was high-end baby
carriages—those strollers with the big wheels. I didn’t have one when my youngest
was a toddler. That was before we understood that small, mesh strollers, (the kind
we could fold and hang over one arm) were a hazard. Now, one simply MUST have
the luxury model. There are a lot of things we feel we MUST have that didn’t
even exist 35 years ago. To go without one such item now, is simply a capital crime.
I’m
making steady progress post-surgery, y’all. Everything except my attitude has improved—that,
and my ability to read and write, to concentrate, and to make sense when I
speak. But who’s counting, right. One of the things that I hope will disappear during
the pandemic is America’s insatiable appetite for “things” new and different—our
pursuit of the world’s best mouse trap, hottest car, and biggest television. I
hope we learn to share, reuse, and pass on to the next generation. I hope we learn
that we don’t need to spend $60,000 on a vehicle to get from point A to point B,
we don’t have to have the Mercedes of baby carriages to push a ten-pound infant
around at the farmer’s market, and we don’t have to swim in the consumerism
pool to be acceptable. We can decide these things for ourselves.
I’m
with Keanu Reeves—we don’t suffer from depression so much as with the
self-inflicted realities of life in the 21st Century. We can do life
differently if we choose.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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