By Lida Prypchan
A man’s lunch cannot be compared to a pigeon’s lunch. Pigeons are part of a nature that is dedicated to idleness. Gaze through the window and you’ll see how the pigeons fly without worry. While man has to work to eat and is responsible for guarding a house, pigeons play all the time or at least almost all the time, and also have a good nap in the morning and whenever they find a warm place. Meanwhile, man leads a life that is quite complicated. While the dog naps, man must run around on the street or sit in an office in order to be able to buy his food and maintain himself. A man’s food is more complicated than that of a pigeon, because it affects the work of thousands of people and has a complicated system of cultivation, sale, transport, delivery and preparation.
However, humanity has its advantages: the pleasures of knowledge, conversation and the joys of imagination. The unfortunate thing is that the issue of feeding ourselves absorbs over 90% of our human activities. If men had not complicated their lives so much with progress, and if getting food was not so hard, man would have no reason to work so hard.
At some point we will be so civilized and the world will be so complicated that getting food will be so difficult that we will feel tired before we start, i.e., in our pursuit of food our craving for that food will disappear.
We have not reached that moment yet. What happens now is that there are many men who are obsessed with work and material possessions, and since they have food, they will not rest until they have a fortune. But that rest never arrives or if it does, it arrives when it is too late. Being next to a person like this is the most distressing thing one can imagine: they have haste, anxiety and restlessness in their skin, they suffer severe mood swings, they switch from the greatest euphoria to the darkest depressions. They work from Monday to Sunday. They build their own tomb with their achievements. Other features of these people are: forgetting to eat or eating little, taking tranquilizers to achieve the stability they need so that they can divide themselves into four and deal with their countless daily occupations. They also tend to suffer from severe headaches, loss of sleep; they are unable to enjoy themselves at all, because they are too busy to be able to concentrate on things they consider unimportant. They cease to be children and, in perhaps one or two years, they become elderly.
In other words, they forget to live. And when they at last achieve their goal, they feel the void left by overwork in obtaining a fortune that they cannot take with them when they die. By comparing the life of one of these gentlemen with that of a fisherman, you can see how the fisherman will have enjoyed the beauty of life a thousand times more than the person devoted to the endless routine of work in order to achieve their goal.
They will obtain what society calls success, but they will have missed hearing the breeze on a mountain top or they will not know the pleasure of sitting in a town square all afternoon, without worries, to see how trees blend with the blue sky and how their branches cover the sun. Or sitting on the seashore to see the waves come and go.
Having one’s eyes closed to the delights of resting is being dead in life.
