Location Taken: Agawa Bay, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010
There’s something very peaceful about just sitting and watching the sunset at an isolated beach in a small campground with only a handful of other people around. No cars whizzing by, no TVs blaring, no cell phones ringing, just you and the sky.
It’s one of those things that so many people seem to miss out on. The simple joy of quiet, and the inner peace it brings.
One of my hobbies is cross-stitch embroidery. It’s a long process. I’m fairly quick at it, but if I do more than a square inch of stitchery in an hour I’m going faster than average. And I’m currently working on a project that’s going to be 12″x18″ once it’s finished. Now, there’s a lot of white space, so it’s not going to take me 216 hours to finish, but it’s certainly going to take a long time. I’ve been working on it several hours a week for over a month and am maybe a tenth finished. It’s not a job for the impatient.
It’s rare for me to see someone else embroidering. And aside from the geekier places I hang out (like the local game store I play role-playing games at), I never see someone working on a craft project like that. Not even at places where I pull it out, like waiting at the doctor’s office while my Mom’s at an appointment. Instead they just sit around looking bored or, more likely, pull out their smartphone and play a game or check Facebook.
I could go on a tirade about “people these days”, but really, the only thing modern life adds to the equation is more things to distract us with. Even in the old days (like the middle ages), most people didn’t work on projects like these unless they were either making a living from it, bored during the long winter months stuck indoors, or part of the tiny upper class that actually had regular free time. And in some senses, embroidery (or knitting, or whittling) was the equivalent of pulling out your smartphone back in those days. Just something to keep your hands and minds occupied while waiting for things to happen.
So it’s not too surprising that as technology progressed, the majority of people dropped the old pastimes and picked up the new. Just look at the word “pastime”, it’s “pass time” smooshed together with the extra s dropped. Quite an apt word.
It’s always been a small group of people who find enjoyment in quiet. Most people are extroverts who need chatter and people around, if nothing else. But those of us who are willing to just sit and watch the world go by, perhaps working on a small project of an old-fashioned type just to keep the hands busy, we do feel like we’ve found something that most people miss. I certainly seem to be more content and at peace with myself than the average person I encounter.
So try watching a sunset someday. Or pick up a crochet hook and some yarn and try to figure it out. You might just like it.
