Wisdom of the past

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There is a very fine line between progress and throwing away the wisdom of the generations that have lived before us.

I am no romantic. I am fully aware that life say one hundred years ago was hard. And while there are some who are yearning for those ‘good ol’ days’, I’m not one of them.
Truth be told, I fully enjoy all the technology I can afford in order to make my life easier. Especially where we are talking household chores...

Can you imagine, washing all your laundry by hand on a washboard? It would take you at least all day. And it wasn’t the only thing that needed to be done. You also needed to cook dinner; perhaps even with very little means... Bearing children wasn’t a choice; getting pregnant was just what happened. And childbirth was something that could well kill you...

No, I am happy that those days are behind us. I am grateful for my washing machine, my fridge, my gas stove, my electrical oven, my microwave... Not to speak of phone, computer, printer, scanner...
They make my life so much easier!

But there are things that were so normal then, common sense things, or even wise things that we may disregard at our own peril.

Like when you put a lot of people, animals, or even the same kind of plants together in a small space, they may get prone to disease, or fall prey to pests. Giving them air and space would usually give their immune systems a chance to recover, to heal the illness. And when there is a greater diversity in the plants we grow for our food, the chances of our crops being diminished by pests get smaller.
And food is grown according to the season...
It is the way nature works.

Or the understanding that when you have worked hard all week, there needs to be a time for rest as well. One cannot just keep keeping on and expect to stay healthy.

Sounds like common sense? Well it is.
And yet in this day and age we seek to protect our crops from insects by making the pesticide part of the genetic makeup of the plants. And when we can no longer keep keeping on, we find ourselves in a burnout that can take a year or longer to recover from...

When we throw away the wisdom of the generations that have lived before us, it is like cutting off the roots of the tree we expect to flourish, and then be surprised that what we have created looks like a desert...
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