Reflections on the Road

Well my thinking may be both cheap and lazy, but it clearly isn’t influential! We have just returned from the agri-store at Souvigny with 45 x 1.8m fence posts, 3 x 50m rolls of 95mm stock fencing, and all the necessary bits and bobs to put it all together. Because…
“Of course we can sell some llamas, but it would be good to have another field anyway.”
Oh, and it seems we need to do it soon, and get some llamas in it to eat the rampantly growing grass, or Simon will have to mow it.

I suppose if we deduct the effort of mowing all the Rough Land, from the effort required to fence it, we effectively obtain an effort discount. Bargain! And I suppose that, even though Simon will almost certainly end up with back ache and sore fingers from the remaining effort involved, he will Be Happy. Because he is always at his happiest when he is Doing Stuff – even, oddly, if he has cause to moan about it while he is doing it. As I have mentioned before Doing Stuff – especially farmery stuff – is his bliss.

Meanwhile, back in the real world of Me, the search for the Elusive Bliss continues. I was reflecting on My Eternal Search during the drive back from Souvigny, while Simon was busy enjoying the Present and commenting favourably on the loveliness of the emerging leafery on the trees and the dappliness of the sunlight on the road. Could it be… could it possibly be the case that Simon is a more evolved soul than am I? Argh, how it irks me to even consider this possibility. And yet the evidence of our parallel but different lives suggests to me that this indeed might be the case.

I was also reflecting on the vast number of ‘Life-Changing’ books I have read over the many years of my Search, and how they have changed my life Hardly At All. Not that I really expected that they would, but, well, you know how it is – “Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but always To be blest.” (Alexander Pope) And, not only does that demon Hope insist on eternally springing, it also does a good sideline in triumphing over experience. I still find myself sucked in by those glowing reader reviews of the latest mindbodyspirit books that kind Mr Amazon.co.uk feels moved to recommend to me on an all-too-regular basis. My Amazon shopping basket is veritably bursting at its virtual seams with the weight of all those must-have, mind-expanding-yet-practical guides to True Happiness that I currently think I might like to read one day.

Luckily though, for our bank balance, our already heaving, dust-covered book shelves, and Simon’s sanity, I am too cheap to actually purchase the things. I content myself instead with exploiting the Amazon ‘look inside this book’ facility, and, being a skimmer by nature, the random selection of pages available to read worries me not. Those oddly non-contiguous pages, together with the list of contents, is generally sufficient to appease my hopeful hunger, and convince me, once again, that there really ain’t no book nowhere that is truly going to change my life. Except maybe one I write myself. Not because I think it would make me rich and famous, but because the very act of finishing something I have started would, of itself, prove that my life has changed.

But then, as we all know, I am also lazy. And if the multitudinous mindbodyspirit books that I have so hopefully devoured over the years have taught me anything, it is this: the Road to Happiness begins with Acceptance of What Is.

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