quick fix society
among的用法My husband and I just got back from a week’s vacation in West Virginia. Of cour, we couldn’t wait to get there, so we took the Pennsylvania Turnpike and a couple of interstates. “Look at tho gorgeous farms!” my husband exclaimed as pastoral scenery slid by us at 55 mph. “Did you e tho cows?” But at 55mph, it’s difficult to e anything; the gorgeous farms look like moving green checkerboards, and the herd of cows is reduced to a few dots in the rear-view mirror. For four hours, our only real amument consisted of counting exit signs and wondering what it would feel like to hold still again. Getting there certainly didn’t em like half the fun; in fact, getting there wasn’t any fun at all.
So, when it was time to return our home outside of Philadelphia, I insisted that we take a different route. “Let’s explore that countryside,” I suggested. The two days it took us to make the return trip were filled with new experiences. We toured a Civil War battlefield and stood on the little hill that fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers had tried to take on another hot July afternoon, one hundred and twenty-five years ago, not knowing that half of them w
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ould get killed in the vain attempt. We drove slowly through main streets of sleepy Pennsylvania Dutch towns, slowing to twenty miles an hour so as not to crowd the hors and hor carriages on their way to market. We admired toy trains and antique cars in country muums and saved 70 percent in factory outlets. We stuffed ourlves with spicy salads and homemade bread in an “all-you-can-eat” farmhou restaurant, then wandered outside to enjoy the sunshine and the herds of cows----no little dots this time----lying in it. And we returned home refreshed, revitalized. This time, getting there had been the fun.hide的过去式
Why is it that the featureless turnpikes and interstates are the routes of choice for so many of us? Why doesn’t everybody try slowing down and exploring the countryside? But more and more, the fast lane ems to be the only way for us to go. In fact, most Americans are constantly in a hurry---and not just to get Point A to Point B. our country has become a nation in arch of the quick fix—in more ways than one.
powerball Now instead of later: Americans understood the principle of deferred gratification. We pu
t a little of each payback away “for a rainy day.” If we wanted a new sofa or a week at a lakeside cabin, we saved up for it, and the banks helped us out by providing special Christmas Club and vacation Club accounts. If we lived in the right part of the country, we planted corn and beans and waited patiently for the harvest. If we wanted to be thinner, we simply ate less of our favorite foods and waited for the scale to drop, a pound at a time. But today we aren’t so patient. We take out loans instead of making deposits, or we u our credit card to get that furniture or vacation trip—relax now, pay later. We buy our food, like our clothing, ready—made and off the rack. And if we ‘re in a hurry to lo weight, we try the latest miracle diet, guaranteed to take away ten pounds in ten days… unless we’re rich enough to afford liposuction.
Faster instead of slower: Not only do we want it now; we don’t even want to be kept waiting for it. This general impatience, the “I-hate-to-wait” attitude, has infected every level of our lives. Instead of standing in line at the bank, we withdraw twenty dollars in convenience store(why wait in line at the supermarket?), where we buy a frozen dinner all wrapped up and ready to be put into the microwave… unless we don’t care to wait eve
n that long and pick up some fast food instead. And if our fast meal doesn’t agree with us, we hurry to the medicine cabinet for—you guesd it—some fast relief. We like fast pictures, so we buy Polaroid cameras. We like fast entertainment, so we record our favorite TV show on the VCR. We like our information fast, too: messages flashed on a computer screen, documents faxed from your telephone to mine, current events in 90-cond bursts on Eyewitness News, history reduced to Bicentennial Minutes. Symbolically, the American eagle now flies for Express Mail. How dare anyone keep America waiting longer than overnight?
Superficially instead of thoroughly: What’s more, we don’t even want all of it. Once, we lingered over every word of a classic novel or the latest best ller. Today, since faster is better, we read the condend version or put a tape of the book into our car’s tape player to listen to on the way to work. Or we buy the Cliff’s Notes, especially if we are students, so we don’t have to deal with the book at all. Once, we listened to every note of Beethoven’s tryptophanFifth Symphony. Today, we don’t have the time; instead, we can enjoy 26 cond of that famous “da-da-da-DUM theme”—and 99 other musical excerpts almost as
famous—on our Greatest Moments of the Classics CD. After all, why waste 45 minutes listening to the whole thing when someone el has saved us the trouble of picking out the best parts? Our magazine articles come to us pre-digested in Reader’national flags Digest风槿如画结局daquan>自荐信格式. Our news briefings, thanks to USA Today, are more brief than ever. Even our personal relationships have become compresd. Instead of devoting large parts of our days to our loved ones, we replace them with something called “quality time,” which, more often than not, is no time at all. As we rush from book to music to news item to relationship, we do not realize that we are living our lives by the iceberg principle—paying attention only to the top and ignoring the 8/9 that lies just below the surface.
free rice When did it all begin, this urge to do it now, to get it over with, to skim the surface of life? Why are we in such a hurry to save time? And what are we going to do with all the time we save besides, of cour, rushing out to save more time? The sad truth is that we don’t know how to u the time we save, becau all we’re good at is saving time…not spending time.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should go back to growing our own vegetables or making our own clothes. I’m not even advocating a mass movement to cut all our credit cards into little pieces. But I am saying that all of us need to think more riously about putting the brakes on our “we-want-it-all-and-we-want-it-now” lifestyle before we speed completely out of control. Let’s take the time to read every word of that story, hear every note of that music, and enjoy every subtle change of that countryside. Let’s rediscover life in the slow lane.
