The Inconvenience Of Convenience

Isn’t that convenient…everything always seems to be so damned convenient. Since the beginning of time, mankind has been looking for ways to make life easier. The wheel made a huge impact on the history of mankind and it has just gone on and on from there. I’m all about working smarter and not harder, but have we gone too far in our day-to-day lives with making things all too convenient to the point that it effects our health?

The car made travel much easier and made far away places more accessible. Then we started putting wheels on everything from chairs to desks and so on. We cater to disabled people with such things as the scooter shopping carts at the super market, but how often do you see people take advantage of those carts. People that are overweight that should be walking instead. Golf carts aren’t only for golfing anymore. Sometimes I see people walking their dogs with them. That’s right, they have a contraption that sticks out the side of the cart that they hook the dogs leash up to and just creep along beside the dogs. The dogs are getting great exercise but their owners are getting fatter, their legs are getting weaker and their hearts are paying the ultimate price.

How many times do we take advantage of our cars, scooters or whatever, when we should be taking advantage of our legs and not taking them for granted. How often do we take our cars a quarter mile down the road to the convenient market when we could just as easily walk. I see people use golf carts to check their mail when their mailbox is at the end of a long driveway. Do we do it because we are lazy? Or because it’s ‘convenient’. How about a bicycle? Bicycling is great exercise. Why don’t more people use them more? Mowing a small lawn with a ride on mower is not only impractical, it’s damn lazy. I have a quarter, maybe a third of an acre that I mow with a push type mower. If I had a ride-on I would probably use it because it’s a lot of lawn. I don’t buy a ride-on because for one, it’s good exercise and for two, I won’t be living here for much more than six more months and I don’t know if the lawn of my next place will be big or small, so what’s the sense.

What I’m getting at is simple and it’s been said a thousand times before by a thousand different people. God, or whoever you believe in gave you a pair of legs to walk on. If you don’t use them they will get weak. Your legs are one of the best calorie burners you were born with. We need to stop taking advantage of the conveniences of everyday mechanical objects and take advantage of the legs you have for what they were intended for. We hate it when the rest of the world calls us “Fat Americans”, but yet we sit here and give them reason.