Rake-A-Thon
I wonder what the world record is for the longest time that anyone has raked for; I did eight hours of it today, so I think I must be pretty close!
The reason I completed a rake-a-thon is because I’ve been working as a gardener over the summer. Now, raking isn’t exactly the most mentally stimulating of experiences, but was it rewarding? Heck yeah!
‘How can this be?’ I hear you cry. You are right to cry, for surely raking for eight hours will rot your brain away and leave your muscles as heavy as lead? Well, yes, it does do those things, but here’s how it refreshes the soul…
The human race is actually rather intelligent, so intelligent in fact that we have invented a machine for nearly every problem we face. We have cars, planes and trains that can transport us around the world in a few hours; the internet allows us to have whole supermarkets and libraries of information at our finger-tips; and e-mail, texting, social networking sites, and even the good old fashioned telephone, mean that we are almost constantly connected with each other. Modern technology has it’s good and bad traits, but as far as I know, no-one’s invented a ‘Rake-o-matic’ (if such a thing exists, why didn’t anyone tell me this morning!). To the best of my knowledge, raking still has to be done by hand.
And that’s where the reward comes in. As God, aka, Morgan Freeman, in ‘Bruce Almighty’ puts it ‘Some of the happiest people in the world, go home smelling to high heaven at the end of the day’. Manual labour gives us something that machines can’t, it makes us feel good about ourselves. After eight hours of raking, I was able to look back down the drive that I was working on and I could see the difference I had made, and as I was leaving to go home, I felt like it had been a day well spent.
The Game We Play 