Generally I am a grateful person. As well as the good things, I am grateful for all the sad and challenging things in my life, for they, too, make me who I am, and who I am has much to be grateful for.  But because I am human I have days I would rather not have.  Today, for a while, Life got on top of me.  In addition to some health issues I’ve been dealing with, the Universe took the opportunity to give me, yet another lesson in patience.

We are having a town council bi-election in 10 days’ time, because a man who is a serial offender of making bad decisions quit the council after only a few months. He did this because of his original bad decision, to try to start an ‘escort agency’ in town (registered address just up the street from us).  It backfired.  He quit.  Maybe that was a bad decision and maybe it wasn’t, I mean who wants this clown on our town council?  But it costs the town about $90,000 to run a bi-election.  So, thanks, buddy. Voting here is mandatory.  Because of this guy, I was required to wait in a queue on voting day, or pre-poll vote, as well as see my tax dollars used for something I had already paid for just a few months ago. In an attempt to at least mitigate the queue standing, I pre-poll voted.

Dissolve scenes to the freezer section of the grocery.  The turkey I wanted to buy was just out of my reach.  Happens a lot, I’m a bit short on one end.  So I stopped a young worker and asked him if he would please reach it for me.  Nice man, he happily did so.  As I approached the queue for the checkout the man working the area announced “If you want service, step up to the self checkout there are empty stations there”.  Nice.  If you want service, give it to yourself.  He’s a nice bloke, has worked there for years and looks like he’s pretty tired, but so was I.  If you have a backache, pushing a shopping trolley will only make it worse.  They are designed with the centre of gravity for someone at least three inches taller than myself.

The trolley full of groceries, and I, arrived at my car in the parking lot to see that someone had pulled too closely to my car for me to easily get the groceries into the boot.  I mean they were over the line by at least a foot. As I heaved the groceries, with a sore back, and wedged between my car boot and the car behind, all I could think was… the world is too much, sometimes.

What was that poem from my school days… someone named Wordsworth? How did that go??? Ah, yes, ‘the world is too much with us’.  That was how he put it over two hundred years ago.  I always think it is amazing when someone who lived centuries before us had similar thoughts and feelings.  It connects us.

I came home and looked up the poem and thought I would share it with you (it’s short).  He is lamenting that society is so caught up in itself, it has lost its connection with nature.

“The world is too much with us”

By William Wordsworth, 1802-1804

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The Winds that will be howling at all hours

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed out worn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

WW was saying that nature was in abundance all around people, but they saw little of it, were out of tune, while slaving away on material lives. ‘We have given our hearts away’ he says. So sad.  And haven’t we come a long way since then?

Ummm, not so much.

Those of you leading a frenzied life with the onset of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and whatever else, try and do a little less. Take the time to watch the raindrops trailing down the window pane, or give the family pet an extra scratch and pat, or close your eyes and take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

This is me saying, two hundred years from now, let it be written, ‘the world is at peace with us, and we with it.’