As I have mentioned before from time to time, I tend to do quite a bit of my thinking while doing manual labour such as the pruning of the olive trees.
As an aside, I don’t recommend it for most people, because for many, being 5 or 6 meters up in a tree balancing on branches to reach just that last couple of shoots you want to get bonsai perfect, is enough to concentrate on. But if you have the capacity to switch at will between “If I screw this up my mangled body will be in agony for a few hours before the sweet release of death” and “The intricacies of marital relationships and child-rearing when compared between today and the 1800s are very instructive; but how do we get zoomer generation illiterates to understand this important issue?” then you may be an olive tree pruner philosopher.
As it started to rain, my loyal henchman and I returned indoors, and I though to try to put at least one of the many concepts into a format that might prove useful to those who frequent this corner of the web.
In keeping loosely with the last post’s theme, the point of the modern “man” is that they are generally a shadow of out ancestors. Doing farmwork makes this absolutely clear in a relatively short time. The very idea of pruning 400 trees, some of them huge and tall and with branches so spread out that you need to gingerly head out on each section of the tree to get to the various branches before turning back and doing it again along another of the main branches, is daunting. And when you are first learning and you do one or two and you think 400? Before they start to flower? Impossible!
And that is precisely where over 95% of “men” stop. They then look to hiring someone else or doing something else or, or, or.
But… if you think logically about it, people have been pruning olive trees for millennia. And doing it without the benefit of electric saws and electric pruners. And they all had plenty of them to do. So… if you just carry on and keep at it, you find that in our case, we are at day 4 and have done only about 100 trees but we also have piled up most of the cuttings too. And we’re being extremely lazy and inefficient about it. A real farmer would be up at 5am, in the field by 6 at the latest, would take a couple of small breaks and be back in at 6 or 7pm and have done maybe even close to 100 trees in a day.
In the old days they didn’t have tractors. They used a scythe to clear a whole field. Uphill too. And when they finished they went back down and did it again because the small grass would have grown over. And the bees would have made honey from the little flowers over the week or so. Now a tractor does it in a day and the bees are screwed.
The point is, we have become so weak and whiny and degenerate that the most basic of tasks like raising your own children, working physically to clear a field and so on are thought of as the hard and difficult, instead of the pleasant and natural. Imagine these metrosexuals walking to Jerusalem and fighting marauding muslims in full armour when outnumbered in some cases 100:1.
You get weak in the knees at the prospect or raking some sticks up for a few days in a row.
Seriously.
I’m going back out now in the refreshing drizzle to finish the trees we decided to do for today.
How about you?
On point.
Yep, the farm where I work has to hire third world workers because the native population is too lazy. Five of the eight employees are from Guatemala. They work hard for minimum wage and are happy to do so. Every now and then a Québécois gives it a try, 80% of the time it is too much for them to handle, 15-20% who can handle it leave because it does not pay enough. Personally, I find the work gratifying and people think I’m crazy because of it. Looking foward to the collapse when they all come crawling back because they can’t feed themselves.
On the other hand the two Québécois that I work with are outstanding people. They don’t complain, they just work. And if something messes up, oh well we have more work. It is not an option to stop untill things are in order.
Those are outstanding Quebecois. Hopefully they make lifelong friends.