Today, I am thinking about the children’s story, “The Turtle and The Hare,” the point of which is that “slow and steady wins the race.” Are you a turtle, or are you a hare?
Most of us have a lot to do. We try to accomplish tasks quickly, especially if someone else is paying us to do them. In business, “time is money.” Said another way, “You snooze, you lose.”
In the course of our common need to earn enough $$ to survive, concurrently, we seem to sacrifice civilities that were once the common expectation in most families. One case in point is the family meal.
When is the last time your family sat down together for a meal, and leisurely ate? The American family meal seems to be becoming a relic of the past. Food is gulped down without barely tasting it because children have to be ushered off to go to athletic games, lessons of all kinds, play rehearsals, and other activities. So, people eat on the run. They “grab a sandwich,” or they stop at a fast food restaurant to fill up on burgers and fries and shakes and deep-fried pies and then they wonder why Americans are often overweight. Somehow, the frantic racing around they do and the expenditure of kinetic energy seemingly does nothing to reduce their weight.
In an ideal world, everything could be done at a more pleasant pace. In the competitive world that we live in, there is an unspoken pressure to “be all that we can be,” and for our children, as well, to do it “all.”
In looking back to my own childhood, I am happy that I could enjoy just being a kid. There was a stream that ran through our back lot. I would sit by that stream for hours, fascinated by the dragonflies that would land on the skunk cabbage, and all the little frogs and creatures I would see there.
I would “borrow” a pie plate from my mother. In those days, there was a bakery truck that came around and sold Wonder Bread and Blueberry Pies in reusable tins that could be turned in, when the truck came again. If I would catch it just right, I could take one of the tins and “make a choke cherry pie” with the berries and mud. I even had a special name for the concoction, which, for the life of me, I cannot remember.
A particular activity that I really enjoyed was playing “house” by draping blankets over the aluminum clothesline and pretending it was a tent. In the better weather, I would play in the sand. In the wintry weather, I would build snowmen, and one year, my brother helped me to make an Igloo that we could actually sit in. Too cool!
What I am getting at, is that the fun I had as a kid, was self-generated. I did not rely on the television and in fact, watched it very little, although we did have one. My two brothers were usually plunked in front of the tube watching their favorite shows.
Kids today could not imagine a world without their own computers, their video games, their “piercings,” their tattoos, their Ipods, and the list goes on and on.
The older I get, the more I long for the simpler times like the days that I once knew, when the pediatrician visited sick kids…at home. Days when the pharmacist knew your name. Days when no one would ever suspect a man of the cloth to be a pedophile. Days when going for an ice cream sundae at Woolworth’s, with Mom, was just the cat’s meow. Days when I could own a little turtle and not be afraid of dying of salmonella poisoning.
When all is said and done, I think I prefer the turtle mentality. Whether we speed up and travel faster or not, ultimately, the same fate awaits us all. I prefer to take my waking slowly, and work in a steady, thought-filled manner, each day. When I worked for a salary, I used to be a “hare,” trying to be superwoman and get as much as I could done, in a day, but now that I am older and have only myself to account to, for any loss or gain, I am a “turtle.” Yes, “Slow and steady wins the race.” 
Patricia
