when all is said and done

So many things in our life are automatic, instant, pre-programmed, plug and play. It's easy for us not to think; to press a button for heating or cooling, turn on the TV and turn off our brains, to buy convenience foods because it's too effortless to cook properly.
...It is so easy for us not to have to face the consequences of our purchases. You buy a hamburger - you're not the one who has to raise or kill the animal. There is a vast distance between the eater and the producer, between the eater and the animal, and this is a fertile breeding ground for apathy, for not caring..
It's not all that long ago that people raised and killed their own chickens. It was hard, bloody work, often done by women. It's likely no one enjoyed it. But they had to do it. I think there is something of salvation in 'having' to do things. As someone who tends to laziness, I have often felt the pull of apathy, the seduction of easefulness.

Ailsa Piper  Sinning Across Spain


“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

—	F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby