Cycle of Stupid

I recently moved into a house again for the first time in many years. It seems for nearly a decade now, I've been living in apartments or townhouses or some other arrangement that left me without having the responsibility of lawn care. I've actually really enjoyed my return to mowing and trimming, and am puzzled by what made me despise it so much throughout my adolescence.

The owner of the house I am renting is a college professor, and recently moved to Canada to take a position there. He left all the tools necessary to tend to the lawn. It is worth noting that he is from Belarus, because that may have something to do with the types of tools he used, and which I also now use. The lawn mower is the only piece of the arsenal that has a motor. It is a simple push mower that is not self propelled. The hedge clippers and edger are manual devices. There is no leaf blower, there is a rake.

A week or so ago after pushing the lawnmower up and down the hill in the back yard, and while trimming the hedges with the massive steel scissors, I found myself unsure of which was burning more; the sweat dripping into my eyes, or my pectoral muscles under the command of the shears. It suddenly occurred to me that I had been getting quite a workout. It didn't take much longer to discover yet another example of how backwards our modern world has become.

Soon after the beginning of the industrial revolution, people started leaving the farms in the countryside. They came in droves to the urban centers to find work in factories. It wasn't just American farm boys who came, but immigrants too. A little more than a half a century later, and those factories began to shut their doors and leave this country just as fast as Irish families left theirs to come here after the potato blight a hundred years earlier. As factories expanded overseas, office cubicles multiplied here. In just over a hundred and fifty years, our work routines went from one characterized by long hours of physical exertion, to eight hours of remaining sedentary like barnacles. It wasn't long before people started dying of diseases previously unheard of. Cancer, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. We learned of something crucial that was missing in our new lives. We gave it a name. Exercise. Its absence was what made way for all these new diseases. Gyms sprang up like mushrooms in a meadow after a heavy rain.

The funny part is that a forty hour work week still leaves an awful lot of free time. While it does not leave nearly enough time to work a farm as a business, it certainly leaves enough to manage and grow enough food to significantly augment a family diet. But for some reason, growing one's own food took on the stigma that you were poor, and the modern lawn was born. The modern lawn still does have the potential to offer a healthy dose of exercise, only that there is really no reward to yield from the labor invested. Unfortunately, now the modern lawn doesn't even give back the reward of exercise. Technological advances have given us the riding lawnmower, the weed wacker, the electric hedge trimmer, the leaf blower, and the leaf vacuum.

This is where the backwards part comes in. We spend money on produce at the market because we plant grass and inedible bushes on the land around our homes. We spend money on devices that ensure we physically exert less energy to cut the grass and manicure the bushes. Then we spend money every month on a gym membership so that we may have a means to get the exercise we need to keep us healthy. Never mind for a moment that there are people in the world who, because they only have a thousand or so calories of food to eat daily, they get faint when they work more than four or five hours in the field. Never mind for a moment that while this is happening, we are burning off our excess thousand calorie intake on the equivalent of a human hamster wheel. For right now, just think about how much money we could save if we just stopped this cycle of stupid, and just planted a garden.