http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/111/adventures-in-the-simple-life
For two years of my life, I lived 'the simple life,' or at least as simple as I will ever make it. I didn't live out in the wild, and really, I wouldn't want to be out in the wild, but my life was taken care of for me. Everyone told me that during that two years of my life, it was supposed to be the simple times, that the only thing that I was supposed to be worrying about was the job there that I was doing.
I had someone else paying for my house, I didn't have a job but still had a monthly income, and even my transportation was covered. I had free reign to do whatever I wanted as long as I stayed in the area that I was supposed to be in, and for the most of my time while doing this, those areas were pretty big.
It was supposed to be simple, but it never was.
The tricky part about things being simple, is that the normal stress and energy that people spend on those day to day life things, got spent on things that didn't matter. Instead of just allowing those complexities to disappear and enjoy the simple things within the simple life, they would decide to keep on being stressed. With nothing else to stress about, the people started to stress about those little things that no one should ever care about.
The mission schedule had times attached to it. There were specific times that you had to wake up, exercise, study, study with your companion, and the list keeps on going. Instead of seeing this as a simple schedule for a simple life, there were those that stressed out about every small detail that they could. It was impossible for them to relax.
The thing I don't understand with all of this was why in the world it was so hard for people to relax into the flow of things. Life was simple. Everything was done for us as missionaries, but some of them just couldn't handle the simplicity.
One of those Elders was Elder Balinski.
Elder Balinski was one of the crazies when it came to never letting the simple life be simple. Doing anything with him was a trial of constantly worrying about the rules and wondering if what he was doing was approved or not. The weird part about working near/around him, was that I was never actually a partner with him. There was never a single time that I was actually going around doing the missionary thing with him, but there were multiple times that I got stuck with him on splits because his companion needed someone to zone out with and do anything besides rip his head off.
Every time that I was with him, it was everything to the letter. If the clock said that it was a minute before the hour, we couldn't leave, but at the same time if the clock was a minute over the hour we were super late and had to get outside right away. The same thing happened at the end of our day. If we came back to the apartment even five minutes early, he would recommend that we go knock doors in the nearby neighborhood because we should, but as soon as that time went to the top of the hour, we had to get home.
The sad part to this is that everyone on the mission had different approaches to just how simple they'd allow the simple life to be. For some it was really simple while others stressed out over details that honestly didn't matter. The sad part comes that there was no evidence one way or another to show the difference between those that stressed out over the smallest details and those that allowed it to be simple. They didn't baptize more people, they didn't find more sucsess, and all things considering they were typically not people that anyone else wanted to deal with because they were so strict to everything that was done.
I'm sick right now, so I've worked on this draft over three days and it is making less and less sense as I continue to write it, so I'm going to finish it now and go to sleep.
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