More and more, it seems, our life is made of plastic. Everything is cheap, easy, and fast. Unfortunately, cheap, easy, and fast often leads us to become depressed, poor, and bloated. No good tends to come of it.
Surely life is better than in the Stone Ages when people had to kill their own mastodons for sustenance. After all, there were no McDonalds to fall back on when the hunting was slow, and there were no Starbucks to help them get going in the morning. (Who would want to live in a world without Starbucks??)
But we’ve gone too far to the other side. We have chased convenience, and it led us down a one way road, a place where the only options we can see are ones that lead us ever further down the road to consumption and ease.
And, for me at least, that leads nowhere fast. This lifestyle convinced me that I needed to spend my life making money, so I can purchase happiness. It taught me that immediate gratification was the ideal and to lack instant gratification was to lack control over my life. Yea, the result wasn’t pretty.
And then my precious daughters were born and I got off that treadmill – and I hopped straight into depression. After all, if I couldn’t be making money and being “productive,” then what was I good for? It took me a long time to get out of that fog. The only way I found a way out was to focus on exactly the opposite of what got me in. Ignore the plastic and disposable, the quick and easy. And instead focus on the eternal. The things that remain of value no matter where and when and to whom we go. And that began my search for slow.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I am bad at slow. I’m terrible and atrocious. I lose my way; I get side tracked, and inevitably I get back into a funk. But when the funk gets bad enough, it brings me back to my senses, and I learn to go back to focusing on value.
And so that is what my blog is about. It’s a walk through my journey away from the convenient and towards substance. Like me, it will be a winding road where we often walk backwards, but it will be authentic. I will attempt to talk about my failures and successes as well as talk about different issues, movies, books, and theories prevalent in our culture that can lead us either away or towards that ideal. And it will be about life and how I attempt to live it. Sometimes maybe it will be just downright frivolous, but what fun is life without some frivolity?