It's 9AM
My Papaw was full of good advice.
Most of the time.
I wonder how much time has had an effect on the wisdom of his words?
Buy land.
Buy Wal Mart and hold.
Get a regular job that doesn’t require a college degree, then work on the degree that the job pays for.
Avoid debt.
Live simple.
Get an older car you can work on and don’t worry about the “next best thing”
Get another job you can work on the side for extra money.
Hunt for meat. Fish for fun.
Plant a garden.
Fill up your wife’s gas tank so she doesn’t have to do it.
Meet your buds for coffee at the diner at least once a week.
Go outside.
A lot.
I’m not amazed at how much sticks with me, but more with how much the advice aligns with some of the “lifestyle” gurus today.
After all the changes we have seen over the past few decades, I’m not surprised so many want to adopt a simple life.
Everything is moving so fast, who wouldn’t want to slow it down.
Except…
When I’m living the simple life, at least the being outside part of it, the days race by.
And I wonder if that’s something that happens with age too.
Words of the past gain wisdom status,
but the days to put those words into effect speed up.
Whoever said youth is wasted on the young was right.
Can you imagine having the energy of a kid and knowing everything you know now, what you could accomplish?
Maybe that’s why so many people get into hacking.
Eat beef. Ice baths. Sauna therapy. Lift heavy. Take long walks.
Life hacking, bio hacking, time hacking.
I know I’m party to it as much as the next person.
Probably more so, because I have so many plans to put into effect.
So many balls in the air, so many things to do, be done, get done and line up the next one.
And the doing too, which takes time.
When the words of Papaw ring out in my mind.
Let’s go sit on the patio.
Growing up, they had a huge patio in front of their detached two car garage.
He built a roof over it.
Tin in the 70’s, then green roof panels that filtered sunlight for as long as I can remember.
There were two huge oak trees that provided a lot of shade, a big redwood picnic table on one end by the grill and chairs.
Lots of chairs.
They had folding web chairs they bought from Wal Mart every season when they went on clearance and metal chairs from the sixties that would fetch a solid price at auction today.
There was a metal table with four ashtray’s on it, and coaster for the coffee mugs.
A lemongrass plant next to the door to scare off mosquitoes and other insects and a shoo fly bottle on the opposite end of the giant concrete pad.
We would unfold the chairs, pop the top on a couple of cold Cokes.
Papaw called them pops, because he was born in Indiana before moving to the Arkansas Delta when he was a child.
It wasn’t coffee with his buds, though he would tell me about that, because that’s how he networked and got carpentry jobs.
And sometimes more.
Go in with a couple of buds to buy land or houses or tracts or invest in businesses, and everybody gets a little piece of the pie profit.
He would talk about the garden coming in that year, or the one in the country and how the muscadines or blackberries were doing.
We would talk about hunting, and fishing and he would tell me I should go to Church more, but he was a Deacon and that was part and parcel of his job.
He built the Church a few blocks from his house, so he had a interest.
But most of all, what he was doing, was showing me how to slow it down.
For days like today, when I’ve scheduled fifteen hours of work in a ten hour window, when “I WANT” is so big and so large it threatens to overwhelm me, when “I HAVE TO” is a tsunami of self created expectation-
Papaw showing me how to make it all okay
Without saying words at all.
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I'm currently working as a nurse, 70 in a couple of weeks, "retiring" at that point. Wanting to upgrade my condo over the next year. Not sure if I will sell or rent then. Planning on turning my minivan into a stealth camper & traveling over the US until I can't. Ppl think I'm crazy at my age...I should be hunkering down in place. But my family is grown, I have no close friends, and haven't seen siblings in decades. Grew up military moving every couple of years, military myself, OTR truck driver, travel nurse. As long as I'm healthy, why not see the country before more wild fires burn the NW,, floods, climate change ruins nature.