With human nature being as it is if you offer someone an apparently low risk “quick” shortcut to just about any situation, they will take it in preference over a risky more long term perhaps considered path. In movies this shortcut mentality often leads people into dire situations which might have been avoided. In wanting the easy out they can fuck up and badly so. People avoid effort and application and can find themselves up the proverbial creek in a barbed wire canoe.
This tendency could be easily exploited. I know this well.
Most people bodge, cut corners and have a hasty slapdash mentality. Patience is as rare as a full refreshing fresh water lagoon on the Nullarbor plain in dry season. People like band aid fixes, an Elastoplast quick answer. One that gets a “problem” off the desk at least for the time being. Better still if they can palm the “problem” off onto someone else, make it an SEP. The greasy buck never stops.
The problem is that shoddy and slapdash can create more problems than it solves.
–
–
Today I have been cleaning out the sewerage drains to the cess pit. They have been problematic since we arrived. They are designed for old-school high cistern tsunami-flush systems not modern eco-cistern flushes. I tend to have to clean about twice a year and my plumber’s rods have paid for themselves in saved money many times over.
We could call it “Zen and the Art of Cleaning out the Shitter”.
The idea being that it is a job that needs done before my bionic hip.
Because my motion is increasingly spastic I could not perform one of the fiddly tasks to get a rod around a partial U-bend. I tried and had to ask the wife to help. There was a choice to do a partial clean and maintenance or do a thorough job. She was able to do the fiddly bit and I was able to finish a thorough job. The rods, now washed, are drying on the drive.
I was less Zen today because of the awkwardness of my body and the pain in my hips.
Similarly the ceiling in the lounge could use another coat of paint at one end. We could leave it or I could do it tomorrow. The temptation to let standards drop is stronger because of my incapacity. We have already made a few compromises. They are realistic. Time is running out a little.
I would like to have all the “heavy” tasks out of the way before they slice me up. I don’t know how incapacitated I will be nor for how long. There are some things that only I can do.
People can mistake being slapdash as being clever or cunning. Cleverness is not the same as wisdom which prefers a more thorough approach.
Wisdom can appear to take more time in the short term, but in the integral over all events, thoroughness is often a saver of time.
Slapdash people never get to see the experimental data which backs us this postulate {above}. They are hasty and prejudiced. They KNOW they are right.
Dreamyoga 