What's the big deal about hard work? I must be missing something. I'm not talking about hustling in a football game or finishing a college degree here, I'm talking about people addicted to the appearance of being too busy to enjoy themselves. Everyone seems so proud and eager to complain about how hard they've been working. We're in such a hurry to be busy with "work", I'm surprised we can find time for the numerous "just trying to stay busy...not enough time in the day" conversations we have with every acquaintance we cross paths with on a daily basis. What do you say when someone asks, "Are you staying busy? Working hard?" Maybe you like to romanticize your daily work-related suffering. Maybe you're looking forward to that retirement you've been suffering for. Maybe you wear a permanent stress-induced scowl as a sort of hard-working gold star badge of honor type thing. I guess I stay busy, but when someone asks me if I'm working hard, I try my best to tell them I'm not. And if I happen to offer them the reassurance that I'm attempting to work as hard as they are, it's simply because I know they can't fathom the idea of leisure.
Work hard, earn money, save money, keep working, keep saving, dream of what you'll do when you've put in your time and realize when you get there, you still can't afford it. You know, the average life-span of a human being is 71.4 years. That's 26,061 days, 625,464 hours, 37,527,840 minutes, or 2,251,670,400 seconds. I've been told a honey bee can flap its wings 200 times in a single second and travel with a hive upwards of 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth, to gather just 1 kg of honey. They're a threatened species you know? Neonicotinoids, a type of insecticide commonly used on farms and urban landscaping, are thought to be a partial cause of the honey bee population's sharp decline. I don't want to alarm anyone, but Albert Einstein said, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left." With a life span of just six weeks, I can't help but feel sorry for the worker bees, but I sure hope they keep busy preserving the life span of the rest of us. Maybe all of the "busy bees" out there are instinctively working themselves to death for the good of us all and I'm just a broccoli flower awaiting pollination. If that's the case, I'll try to be a dandelion. I'm grasping for irony...maybe I should work a little harder?
It's August here in Indiana. The sun is shining and the cicadas are singing. You can call it work if you'd like, but for God's sake, go enjoy yourself. As for me, I need to go mow the grass. I don't necessarily enjoy lawn care, but you can be sure if I find hard work somewhere in the front yard, I'll stop the John Deere right there, have a glass of lemonade, and take a nap in the shade until the work goes away.
