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"Yes, We Can Come To Your Farm"
6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
In praise
How can you be as efficient as
you're supposed to be in the modern
world when you're stuck with a
snow -plugged laneway that leads
onto a deep -drifted concession that
connects with a
highway that the
O.P.P. have
closed down?
Let's face it,
it's pretty tough
for us to be
competitive with
Mexico when
we're buried
under snowdrifts
to our adam's
apples. In our
modern world
where Toronto
behaves as if it
were in Calif-
ornia, how can inhabitants of the
snowbelt keep up the pace?
Perhaps I'm remembering the past
through a rose-coloured rearview
mirror but I remember my boyhood
on the farm as different. Without
snowblowers and built-up roads, we
didn't have much choice but to settle
in around the box stove for the
duration when the snow started to fall
and the wind to blow. We were
secure in the fact the barn was full of
feed, the woodshed was full of wood
and the cellar was full of food. There
were morning and evening trips to
the barn to do the chores (complete
with frustrations of frozen pipes) but
there was no pressure to keep the
farm ticking along as if it were May.
We read. We thought. We enjoyed
being together (until the storm lasted
too long and we started getting on
each other's nerves). There was a
glorious sense of freedom from
responsibility.
I sense things aren't the same on
the modern farm. I know they're not
the same in my life. As I strive for
suitably modern efficiency I often
feel guilty if I'm not accomplishing
more than one thing at once. Even if I
try to slow down to smell the roses
(or watch the birds at the feeder or
listen to the stream at the back of our
farm bubble over the rocks), I find
my mind and body barreling ahead at
supersonic speeds.
of down-time
The irony is, of course, that true
efficiency is only made possible by
an apparently inefficient use of time.
Most of the machines, from the
automobile to the computer, which
speed up our lives today, would
probably never have been created if
the inventor had been worried about
making each and every moment
productive. It takes a lot of "wasted"
time staring out windows, reading,
taking long walks and thinking, to
come up with the creative ideas that
can change the world.
I live in two mutually exclusive
worlds. In business, I'm supposed to
become more and more efficient,
packing more productivity into every
single moment. But the other side of
me is a writer who knows that you
have to spend a lot of time staring
into space if you want to summon up
those deeply buried thoughts that
amount to creativity.
We are being urged, in our
globally competitive world, to earn
our living with our brains instead of
our brawn — to be more creative. Yet
we're also being pushed to pack more
and more into every 24 hours.
Perhaps then we snowbelters
could turn winter to our advantage.
No matter how we try to keep up a
living and working pace set in sunny
California or even snowless Toronto,
we just can't do it. So maybe we
should go in the opposite direction.
Maybe we should change our
lifestyles to fit our climate, relax and
enjoy the down-time instead of
fighting the weather. Maybe we could
turn our handicap into our advantage.
Reading what others have been up to,
staring into the fire or watching the
snow mount up outside the kitchen
window could lead to creative
solutions to problems, to the kind of
inventiveness rural people have
always been known for. At the very
least, it would make us live longer.
So here's to a snowbound lifestyle
and guiltless days of doing nothing
"important" at all. If you can't do
anything about the weather you can at
least relax and enjoy it.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice as well
as being a playwright. He lives near
Blyth, ON.