When you play the House, the House always wins.
One of the issues in an industrialized society is that most of the elderly are in poor health. The House tells us that when we get older we must expect to have a medicine regime for morning and evening. Those little pill boxes with the days of the week printed on each compartment are a common site in an elderly person’s home. Along with that we lose our strength, our hair, our hearing and sense of smell, our teeth, and worst of all we lose our memories and the ability to learn new things! We lose brain cells and connections between ideas and memories. Doctors shrug and say that we can’t really expect much else “at our age” and there’s not much that can be done. So, we sit and take it easy and take our pills on schedule. The elderly are expected to be sedentary and ill.
The House tells us that we are successful if we make a lot of money, if we have one or more “McMansions” in a gated community, or on the side of a mountain, or the seashore. All of our work and play spaces are inside climate control, so we are always not too hot and not too cold. We are connected to the outside world through the Internet, TV, and iPhone. Our car is parked in an attached garage. We can come and go without ever having to breath fresh air or touch nature. In the 21st Century we have an epidemic Vitamin D deficiency, among both adults and children!
The House tells us that good nutrition means convenience. We consume fake food from fast food places and super-center supermarkets. What we don’t know is that it’s all sugar, poison for our immune systems. We end up fat and sick. In the 21st Century, we have epidemic obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure!
The House tells us that we need a college education. We go into debt to support the bottom line for big business, instead of learning to contribute to our own communities, to solve local problems. In the 21st Century there is record debt, default on student loans, and the life-threatening stress that causes physical and emotional illness. Suicide rates have sky-rocketed and violence in schools has become epidemic!
What’s wrong with this picture? For one thing it’s unfair to our children and grandchildren! If we go along with these cultural expectations, if we play the House, we rob future generations of all the accumulated wisdom and experience that could help them thrive. It’s unnecessary and not inevitable. The keys to physical health and emotional well-being are movement and exercise, good nutrition, and positive social-emotional relationships.
Despite what the House tells us, we don’t have to be fat and sick. We can learn to restore our communities to social and economic health. We can encourage ourselves and others to get up and move around. We can cluster “tiny houses” around common areas, build healthy social relationships. We can learn to connect to nature, moving between “work and play spaces” depending on what we want to do next. It’s not a big deal, but the idea is just to get up, keep moving, and keep learning.
We can learn to eat what we grow and grow what we eat. We can learn to eat in-season veggies and fruit, but we also ferment, freeze, and can when we have extra, and store food for out-of-season chomping. We can learn to spend time nurturing family relationships, building friendships, and learning new skills. We can learn to revisit and restore the Good Ideas from the past. Because there were Good Ideas back then, and we’ve lost a lot of them. We can learn to thrive well into old age, and teach our children to do the same.
So, maybe the answer is ‘Don’t play the House’. Could be it’s just that simple.
Cheers,
Gus
