“Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what piece there may be in silence.” Good advice in this line from the poem Desiderata.
For a lot of us life has become difficult. Too fast. Too stressful. Too much to do and not enough time to do it.
Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Most women too, it seems these days. Life and the world around us can seem overwhelming.
It’s full of noise and distractions, like your cell phone and email.
Finding a quiet time
Do you feel tied to your electronics? Is your cell phone part of you? Do you check your email 10 times a day, or worse yet, does it pop up continuously while you are working?
Do you ever let down? Does the noise ever stop?
Do you ever get any quiet in your life? No?
Getting outdoors
Well, what can you do about it? One thing you can do is to get outside.
Take a walk. Look at the trees. Listen to the sounds.
Or just work in the yard. Yard work? Does it sound like a chore? Well, it can be relaxing and rewarding.
I would advise, though, that you don’t just complicate your work in the yard and make it as difficult as the rest of your life.
Keep it simple. Peaceful. And quiet.
Old-fashioned tools
How? Well, you don’t simplify things with power tools, like electric hedge clippers and lawn tractors. You do it with a clipper in your pocket and with an old-fashioned reel mower.
A reel mower? Reel mowers are the old fashioned mowers. They don’t have gasoline engines. They run, like my old uncle used to say, on “armstrong” power. That’s the power of a strong arm.
In other words you push them. And when you do the wheels turn and the blades start to whoosh and the grass clippings flitter about and settle quietly to earth.
Did you know that reel mowers — in this industrial age of electronic everything — are some of the most popular products on sites like Amazon.com?
No muss. No fuss. And no noise. When you mow you just hear the clip-clip of the blades. And at the end of the row? Silence. No engine noise. Nothing to drown out the bird calls and rustling leaves.
The reel mower is just one great idea from PimpAngel.com, where they’re making the world a better place for online shopping, one product review at a time. You should take a look.