Cause and Effect

           We laugh at commercials that grab us in the first 10 seconds with the fancy car or the “fix it” drug, followed by some fast talking announcer filling the remaining 20 with a litany of disclaimers about everything that might possibly go wrong…

            But despite said disclaimers, we write down the drug and long for the car just the same…(Madison Avenue knows us pretty well.)

            The good news about physical exhaustion (in my case thanks to a teeny, tiny tick so powerful as to render a full grown female worthless for a couple of days) is it gives one time to think. As I slowed down long enough to ponder life, and my own choices here of late involving farming and living more simply, this whole notion of cause and effect kept playing over and over in my head.

            Whether you like it or not, we live in a cause and effect world, with “cause” being those things we think about, wish for, long for, and “effect” being that thing that manifests in the physical world once the cause side of the equation has been properly addressed.

            To use the garden as analogy, “cause” would be the seed (i.e. that thing we plant, then water, then fertilize, then weed, giving proper time and space to) --the “effect” would be the resulting plant we see crop up in a matter of weeks, provided we’ve tended to the first half of this equation properly.

            Any farmer knows (and I am quickly learning) there is a necessary mixture of time and energy between cause and the effect that, depending on how you approach it, will make or break you. Try as you may to speed it up, nature goes at her own pace; you can’t rush her. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—the world the media would have us believe—turns a blind eye to this notion....even scoffs. We spend minimal time focusing on the cause of things, much preferring we jump to the effect, after all, that part’s far more fun.

Although we know crimes don’t get solved in an hour and pills don’t cure you in an instant, this notion of instant gratification still seeps incessantly into the subconscious soil of our minds, with the result being a rapidly growing disconnect with reality. 

Most everyone I know enjoys thinking about their dreams; some of us paste up pictures; others write them down. But when it comes to realistically approaching a dream, and what time it might take to reach it, we’ve been sold on unrealistic expectations, after which, there usually comes a crash. Why? Because cause and effect is not optional. It is law.

            Still we fast forward through the cause side of the equation, much preferring “effect” (as in “Let’s have it now!"), but nature doesn’t work that way, and neither does life. Yes, we can fake ourselves out…have the stuff we want “now” often with very little thought given to it. But one day, we wake up to mounting debt, mounting stuff, and mounting frustration as to how we got so overloaded, as if life was out to punish us, when in fact, we’ve been punishing ourselves all along.

I was talking with a Master Mind partner the other day (if you’re unfamiliar with the concept, Master Mind has to do with goal setting in groups of 2 or 3, as a matter of accountability and support). As we pulled out our respective journals to make notes for the upcoming month, I noticed he had created a space on his page for something I had not…

            My page had lines for dreams, goals and even achievements and accomplishments to check along the way so as to keep us motivated.

            On his, he had added “obstacles to remove”…defined as those pesky, not-so-fun tasks that are nowhere near as fun as goals, but left unattended can keep you from ever achieving yours.

            I had never thought about listing obstacles on my otherwise fun and creative “goal” page—After all, who likes to give energy to obstacles? But I had to agree, that at any given point in time, we could all point to something (usually several somethings) that we've been dreading...that thing we know won’t be fun—that perhaps keeps getting pushed further and further down the list. Just thinking about it makes you want to shop or eat chocolate or have a drink. And you can opt for that... until one day—BOOM. The brakes fail. The roof leaks. Our health gives out. The bank calls.

            We act surprised, but we shouldn't.  We had every warning sign, including our gut. But because we’ve become masters at avoiding the non-fun stuff, skipping ahead to the “effect” side of the equation, we pretended we were getting away with it. But in reality, cause and effect is law. Ask Einstein. You can’t short circuit it.

            Face it. We’re a love the dream/hate the discipline kinda culture. We love the house/ hate the maintenance. Want the car/hate the payments. We’ve convinced ourselves a winning lottery ticket will solve it all, despite repeated proof to the contrary. Somewhere along the way we started to equate the American dream with entitlement, forgetting that those who came here first in search of it, were some of the hardest working creatures to ever walk the planet. 

            And yet we love the Cool-aid. I dare say we're addicted. Seeping into our homes, into our psyches, is a repeated barrage of misinformation streaming at us constantly, suggesting we can override nature and collapse time, but it doesn't work that way.  Every ad, every sitcom, every movie, poses a problem, a bit of conflict and within a short window of time, a very tidy resolution wrapped up 30 seconds, 30 minutes or 2 hour increments. And while consciously we know “that’s just Hollywood”, subconsciously it’s affecting us, even altering us and the way we look at life. And like the frog in the pan of slowly heated water, by the time that water boils, it’ll be too late to jump.