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The city makes you smart. The city makes everyone smart. But the countryside makes you wise.
You don’t have to live in a big city to be an urbanite. You just have to be removed from natural growth processes such as food production. Pretty much, if you don’t grow your own food, you are an urbanite. The majority of people who live in the more comfortable and convenient countries of the world, are urbanites. I am an urbanite, too. I just had the privilege of an extended rural experience a long time ago.
I submit to you that it is because so many of us live in urban environments, that we have trouble learning languages or doing any kind of sustained long-term project. We give up on our languages; we give up on our blogs; we give up on exercise; we give up on diets; we give up on New Year’s Resolutions by mid-February; we give up on reading Tolstoy. The words “long time” are anathema to us.
In urban environments, for the most part, we do not get to observe, ponder and participate in a wide range of organic (biotic) growth processes. In urban environments we do not move far; we do not see far (buildings block our field of vision), and thus we cease to think far and act for the long. We see no connection between the present and the distant future.
In urban environments, things do not get better with time — they get worse. Things do not grow, they decay. Things do not regenerate, they just die. We don’t really reuse things (although we occasionally pretend to get other people to reuse things for us and call it “recycling”). Your TV doesn’t grow into a big-screen TV. It gets old, becomes incompatible with the new TV standard, stops working, and gets thrown away. Certainly, it doesn’t appreciate in value. About the only thing that grows in an abiotic, urban environment is interest — but evidence abounds that few of us urbanites understand even this man-made growth process.
We are divorced from the cycle of life.
An oak tree grows tall, strong and majestic, deepening its roots…the older, the better. Sometimes it talks to hobbits.
An old TV becomes sodaigomi (oversized garbage). Dead weight. Bulk. It gets thrown in the dumpster, to be replaced with something new — the newer, the better. Just like those fad diets and New Year’s resolutions…
Submitted January 28, 2018 at 11:48PM by Pauline5661 http://ift.tt/2nizwMN
