Dig the Well Before You are Thiristy

I recently heard, or read, a saying, “Dig the well before you need a drink”. Now that is good common sense compressed into a short phrase. It could be literal, meaning if you know you are going to need water, and we all do, then you need to make plans for obtaining water, before the need is at a “crisis” stage.

That puts me in mind of some of the basic things that we all should know, but seemingly, we let them slip away from our mind. It is hard to imagine anyone who heats with wood, as an example, who does not bother to get up a woodpile before winter sets in. But we see that very thing happen every year. I have a neighbor (and I trust he does not find this blog J ), but it appears that he must not have much of a woodpile. The reason I think this is because I hear him with his chainsaw and tractor down in his woodlot late at night, on cold nights too, cutting firewood. I happen to know the young man works like a ‘slave’, with a full-time job during the day, plus he milks a small herd of dairy cows and does other farming on the side. It is not as if he was too lazy to cut wood, he has just fallen into a very common condition of having too much work and not enough time. Thus, he must take care of what is most pressing at any given time, while everything else waits its turn. Yes, I have been there too often to want to remember.

This leads me to the ideal that we have a habit of getting ourselves entangled in so many things that, when it is all added up, we can’t get anything done properly. It is one thing to make plans that are necessary to our daily lives and well-being, but quite another when we find ourselves ‘buried under a load of details’ that we cannot possibly get done and still maintain our health and sanity.

I don’t claim that the condition is always avoidable. It is and has always been a challenge for working people to keep up with their workload at all times, in fact it is nearly impossible. Sometimes I have so many ‘details’ to attend to, I want to cry out, “Details, details, details, thousands of them, like a field of wheat, every little grain a “detail” that is screaming for attention.” But often enough, I have brought this condition upon myself by not attending to the details as they come up. Procrastination is not always a bad thing, but it can get you into a lot of complications.

Most often the term “procrastinate” is seen as a negative, and generally that would be true. However, there are some positives that can come from procrastination. For one thing, it can save you money, under some conditions. By putting off the purchase of some item you want or need, often you discover an alternative that works, and thus the item was not really needed, you just thought it was. For example, in my small lumber business I supply kiln dried lumber to furniture and cabinet shops. Many times the customer wants lumber that has been straightened on one edge. This I accomplished, most often, with what is called a “Straight Line Rip Saw”. Now that piece of equipment is very expensive, even used ones can fetch close to $10,000. That is too much, in light of the relatively small numbers of orders I get requiring a straight edge. But when I was getting my business off the ground it was an item I kept looking for in hopes of finding one at a reasonable price. By procrastinating on it, I found, by accident, a solution to the problem when I purchased a wood shaper. That is a piece of equipment used to put a design on the edge of the face of lumber. Once I had that piece of equipment I discovered that by buying a $100 cutter, that I could turn it into a “Straight Line Rip Saw” that answered the purpose very well. Procrastination paid off that time.

That is not always the case. Take auto maintenance. Most often procrastination does not work to ones advantage if we put off servicing our automobiles. For by delaying auto service we put not only our safety at risk, but can incur a lot of unnecessary expense. I would imagine most of us can think of our own examples to go along with that form of procrastination, I will spare you my painful confessions on that one.

Here is the some good advice that I have found to be helpful along the way. Whenever you have to make a major decision that involves ‘known choices’, but the consequences are important, do this. Take a sheet of paper and a pencil and draw a line down the middle. In one column write one of you choices. Under that choice list all the pros and cons you can think of by choosing that plan or decision. In another column or columns, write out other possible choices you have and list the pros and cons of those decisions. It is remarkable how we can clarify the choices we have, and thus, see more clearly the best choice to make.

As we go through life, we can make our trail a little easier by taking the Boy Scouts motto and making it our own; “Be Prepared”. The best preparation is made ahead of a crisis, when the mind is not under a cloud of pressure.
Naturally, we cannot foresee every ‘crisis’ that we will face in this world, but by training our thought process by sound reasoning and common sense, we develop a better ’instinct’ than by simply barging ahead in life, without any sense of direction or training in the decision making process.

It is remarkable that our education system has become so clouded over with so much ‘book learning’, that many young people leave school and have never been taught the necessity of “critical thinking”, which becomes so vital to a life that is well balanced and happy. What good is it to me, if I know all the “facts” of mathematical equations, but can’t balance a check book?

I have a lot of faith in our upcoming generation, from my place in history, that is people who are from 25 years old to 35 or so. Though we could point to a lot of “losers” in that age group, as we can in any age group, we also see a lot of good, well grounded people with ‘common sense’. I just hope they are the ones who take the “bull by the horns” and straighten out the mess that “my generation” has gotten our country in. It is going to take a “deep well” with lots of water, to clean up this mess of economic mismanagement and political corruption we are in. We need to dig the well deep and dig it now! It won’t be very long until we need the water.