Grampa's Stories

One of my favorite things to do is to listen to my grandparents tell me about how things were when they were young. In just the span of a few decades, thewhole world has changed, and so much of common knowledge has been turned on its head. My grandfather told me about the days he worked on the farm with his brothers and how they grew their own food. His family hardly ever had money, he said, but they never went hungry. It's impressive to me to hear about how much respect and knowledge he and his family held for the land they tended and that tended them. I even felt a little jealous of that kind of life. Even though we have technology, comfort, and convenience today that my grandfather could never have predicted back then, I don't think we're necessarily happier. Do we have more fun surfing the internet than my grandfather did playing football with a burlap sack full of rags?

But even though a lot has changed, I think a lot has stayed the same, too, and when I think of things that continue on, one of the things I think about is how happiness always seems to have come from the inside out, not the other way around based on how easy things are. Even though we have a lot more technology and convenience around us today, we still seem to have a lot of the same struggles past generations did before us. Like, for instance, people still judge others for being different than they are. Politics is still confusing. Poverty and hunger still hurts people around the world even though there's enough to go around. These and other things are issues that technology alone can't address; we have to address them in our principles first. As a scientist, I think it's easy for me to put a lot of hope in the acquisition of new knowledge, and that's going to being us a lot, no doubt about it, but we still have lot yet to conquer in the human spirit, and that's something more to do with meditation than experimentation.

Even in my twenties, my granddad's stories still fill my eyes with wonder and really give me a genuine hope that we can still do a lot of good just by the way the act and think, which has very little to do with modernness at all. We just need to remember that to whom much is given, much is expected, and that our time has given us some pretty awesome things.