50+ Lifestyles

A Good Perspective

By David W. Deuth, CFSP
President, Weerts Funeral Home

While traveling along the Ohio countryside with some friends a few years ago, I distinctly remember driving by an Amish family working their farmland. A young boy – perhaps just 7 or 8 years old – was leading a team of four horses along the roadside while his father worked nearby. The mother, hanging laundry on the clothesline, was joined by a small girl. All were dressed in traditional Amish clothing; the father wore the characteristic Abe Lincoln beard.

An idle black buggy, modernized only by the awkward presence of a slow-moving vehicle sign on the back, sat roadside; its horses, only loosely tied to a fence post, fed nearby in the grass.

Over the next hill, an old single-bottom horse-drawn plow sat unattended in the middle of a partially plowed field. Alternating segments of grass and furrowed soil striped the landscape as the plow – at rest mid-furrow – stood absent both horse and farmer.

    The simplicity of the setting was truly captivating. I asked my friend to stop the car; stepping out to take a photo, I attempted to imagine the events that set this stage. Clearly grassland, it was evident that the soil had not been previously plowed. The plow dug deep, folding the grass beneath and curling the rich, fertile soil to the surface. New cropland, I decided; must be intending to expand.

I smiled as I soaked in the beauty of the spring landscape and the simplicity of the lifestyle. Driving away, I looked back until the setting disappeared over the knoll, thinking all the while that my grandparents must have farmed much this same way some 90 years ago. Such unexpected complexity in such simplicity.

By today’s standards, such a lifestyle would be deemed wholly inefficient; indeed, it will take the farmer several days of operating the horse-drawn single-bottom plow to accomplish what today’s sophisticated machinery could accomplish in perhaps a couple of hours.
I began to look around my friend’s car. It was quite new and nicely equipped. Air conditioning. Power seats. Sunroof…electric. We drove off listening to the satellite radio and adjusting the air conditioning to our comfort.

My cell phone shook at my side; instinctively, I reached for it, and, glancing down at the screen, discovered that someone had sent me an email. How foreign such technology must be to them, I thought…even as I wondered how in the world I’d get by without it.

Efficiency and productivity, consummate requirements of today’s fast-paced society, are fueled by technological advances that aid and abet such things as texting, blogging, posting to social media and multi-tasking…all of which have their place and their purpose, I suppose.
But, as Dr. Alan Wolfelt has wisely noted, it is important that we don’t “confuse efficiency with effectiveness”. Efficiency without effectiveness is merely going through the motions…with little or no result. And that, in the end, is never efficient at all.

With the Ohio countryside in the rearview mirror, I took pause long enough to realize that this Amish family didn’t farm the land so much to make a living as to instead make a way of life. Our fast-paced, hi-tech world, I decided, gets the two confused far too often.

One of my favorite quotes of all time, attributed to Sir Winston Churchill and popularized by Ronald Reagan came immediately to mind:

“We make a living by what we get – we make a life by what we give”.

Regardless of how fast-paced and hi-tech our world becomes, that’s always a good perspective to keep.

Remember Well.

David W. Deuth, CFSP, is the owner of Weerts Funeral Home in Davenport and
RiverBend Cremation and Quad Cities Pet Cremation in Bettendorf.
He can be reached at 563.424.7055 or by email at Dave@WeertsFH.com.

David W. Deuth, CFSP, is a funeral director and the owner of Weerts Funeral Home in Davenport, as well as RiverBend Cremation and Quad Cities Pet Cremation in Bettendorf.  He can be reached at 563.424.7055 or via email at Dave@WeertsFH.com.