The Tao of Pooh
By Benjamin Hoff.
You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count. One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something. After all, from the scholarly point of view, it’s practically a crime not to know everything. But sometimes the knowledge is the scholar. It’s a bit hard to understand because it doesn’t seem to match up with our own experience of things. In other words, Knowledge and Experience do not necessarily speak the same language. But isn’t the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than knowledge that doesn’t? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around – walk through the grass, talk to the animals, that sort of thing.
The Busy Backson is always going somewhere, somewhere he hasn’t been. Anywhere but where he is. For a reward, perhaps. Our Busy Backson religious, sciences, and business ethics have tried hard to convince us that their is a great reward waiting for us Somewhere, and that what we have to do is spend our lives working like lunatics to catch up with it. Whether it’s up in the sky, behind the next molecule, or in the executive suite, it’s somehow always farther along than we are…just down the road, on the other side of the world, past the moon, beyond the stars.
Now, one thing that seems rather odd to us is that the busy backson society, which practically worships youthful energy, appearance, and attitudes, has developed no effective methods of retaining them, a lack testified to by an ever increasing reliance on the unnatural. False Front approach cosmetics and plastic surgery. Instead it has created countless ways of breaking youthfulness down and destroying it. These damaging activities that are not part of the search for the Great Reward seem to accumulare under the heading of Saving Time.
Practically speaking, if time saving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now, than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It’s really great fun to go someplace where there are no time saving devices, because, when you do, you find you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you’re too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won’t have to work so hard.