Supersized Tea Cups

An interesting conversation about our society arose a few days ago when my wife and I looked at the size of the cups we were drinking our after-dinner tea from.  We bought them at Pier 1 import a few years back.  Nice looking things - the ceramic has a water-colour looking design, green with red flowers on a yellow background.  They can hold about 500 millimetres of liquid. 

So the conversation evolved from there.

We spoke about how our grandmothers used to knit sweaters rather than buying them.  How, as we grew taller and our arms longer, they would unknit the sweater and make a larger one from the same yarn rather than buy a new one.

Granny would also cook meals at home, from scratch.  Ready made sauces, vinaigrettes were not available.  She would have to mix the lemon or vinegar with the oil.  The spaghetti sauce had to be made and simmered for the hour.  Cake making involved mixing flour with eggs, sugar, baking powder, butter - not opening up a package and adding water.

Granny had a vegetable garden.  So cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli would come from the garden not from a farm four thousand kilometres away.  Of course, since we lived in Montreal, there would be no such vegetables in the winter.

In sixty brief years (two generations - my parents and my own) things have changed so much and so fast.  Our society continues to innovate at an ever accelerating speed.  Accelerating our separation from nature, from the fact that we are animals living in nature.  Our mind's ability to adapt to all this change is not so quick and nimble.  Deep down we know we are animals.  Our instincts have not changed much.  The acting we do, the roles we play, are a facade that allows us to survive, short-term, in this ever changing society.  We should not forget that larger, longer-term, forces are at work.  These fast paced changes rub against our slower moving, forgotten, instincts, causing stress to build up - just as stress builds up along the fault lines between tectonic plates awaiting the "Big One".

May the Earth shake soon.

Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

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