This modern world seems to be all about business. Whatever the business, the premier driving force is, apparently, efficiency. Fewer steps, greater output, faster travel. No-one is walking barefoot through ten miles of snow to dig for coal any more. Now we melt the snow, re-freeze it into ice and skate those ten miles so we can push the ‘dig’ button on our Coal-O-Matic (patent pending).
Now, that’s all well and good; using fewer resources to gain the same result is almost always beneficial. And it helps when you’re the kind of person who can view other people simply as ‘resources’.
I should point out that this blog is not about sticking it to the man (hee hee). It’s merely a shout-out to those wonderful things which eschew the strictures of efficiency and give us cause to say “make life, not work”.
It’s always been true that the quickest route from Point A to Point B is in a straight line. With few exceptions, there are no straight lines in nature, and that’s a good thing. There’s little that’s more plain or boring. Cast your eye over the ocean as it rushes in to hug your ankles. Scan the might of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. Study a map of a low-lying tidal river (like, say, the Brisbane River) as it serpentines its way to the coast. Nothing straight, not a hint of efficiency.
Or here’s an even nicer one: examine the curves and valleys of a particularly fine member of the gender you prefer. There may be symmetry, but there’s not a lot of straight lines.
The trouble is, even we modern people who strive for efficiency still have nature in our brains, and it confuses us. If nature was a business, it would have been bought up and liquidated decades ago by a soft drink company or a shoe manufacturer.
We’re constantly sold the line that efficiency should be our goal. Like hell, I say! If efficiency was our only goal then we’d drink embalming fluid instead of red wine. Let’s hear it for magnificent folly! Stop and smell the roses, or the luxuriant hair of that willowy girl in accounting. Ride a steam train for two hours from Point A until it gets you all the way over to…Point A again.
Remember: it’s efficiency that means we pee from the same place as we fuck!