The Destructiveness of Ease
Pearl is 86 and heats with wood. He has for the length of his life. When a friend asked how he splits his firewood, he answered,”With an Armstrong splitter.” He raised two fists head high and drew them in to flex his biceps.
Pearl had gone his whole life chopping wood by hand and can still do so. Perhaps the reason he can still do so is because he does.
“I’m cold!” I would tell Dad when the New England winters in our old house got to me. “Then put some clothes on,” he would say regardless of the layers already worn. After cutting firewood to last the winter for our family and his parents, he knew the cost of warmth.
With the ease of which we do most things there is often a disconnected violence attached, an unconscious destructiveness, a carelessness. Care is neither given nor taken.
“The reason I love digital photography is because I can take as many photos as I want and delete the ones I don’t like,” I have heard people say.
What if the photographs we take are of people? What if the intrusive act of documenting life was not as easy to do and to discard? Would we do it as often? Would we think more about what it is we are actually in the act of doing?