The way we are

I woke up today harking back to my youth in a remote farming village in the Philippines where I grew up. The village has the sea on one side and the hills on the other. There are some parts of the village where the hills slide into the seashore.
I often watched the turquoise sea from those hills while greasing four carabaos - indigenous Asian farm animals used for plowing rice fields - when schools closed during the summer vacation. The wide open seas often made me dream of neon lights in the cities that I used to see in the movies.
Like most lucky dreamers, I had made my dreams come true and have had a taste of night life under those neon lights, only to find out later that those neon lights are symptoms of hurried and harried lives. I found out that life in the city is not a fairy tale where the denizens live happily ever after.
While harking back to my youth in the farm, I remember the saying by an anonymous author: "Man is a fool, when it is hot he wants it cool, when it is cool he wants it hot, always wanting what is not." That's a nice way of describing our discontent with what we are and what we have.
Our discontent prompted us to invent tools way back in ancient times that historians marked as the dawn of civilization. That dawn ushered in the industrial revolution that has complicated our lives. Those who feel or starting to feel the pressures of the fast city life will find this story very familiar.
Whenever I think of my youth in the farm, I miss the swarm of fireflies that used to wrap the trees in our backyard and long for the rustic life that I had left behind.

Please read my other blog Fun in life with link salt-funstories.blogspot.com