I found several synonyms today in Webster's New World College Dictionary for the word enthusiasm - intense or eager interest; zeal or fervor. Of course, other words define enthusiasm too, words that might appear more clever or pertinent depending on which scenario they describe, but I found these little words most relative to my story and amusingly, I haven't seen or heard from 'intense or eager interest" in quite a while. I wonder if they have escaped from society and drifted out like dinosaurs into extinction; maybe its just feels that way in a recession/depression economy when it is hard to be enthusiastic about breathing, much less feel turned on to an involved project or homespun preoccupation just because it tickles your fancy to dream about it.
The last time I felt an "intense or eager interest" about a project was in 1997, at the end of the last recession when I, a city woman in a tech job, and my late husband, a retired guy from a local newspaper and former Wall Street junky, decided to start a sheep farm. Not long into the project, we realized that our appetite for information about barn life was insatiable. We read everything there was to read, and learned everything there was to know about ewes and rams over months of lunch breaks and long evenings after dinner. For the purpose of this essay I will call this a thrust of "compelling enthusiasm." Of course I could also add other relevant adjectives to the word, if only for the purpose of qualifying this definition specifically to our situation; overwhelming enthusiasm, totally absorbing enthusiasm, assertive and aggressive enthusiasm, powerful and enabling enthusiasm, disarming enthusiasm, totally annoying enthusiasm, breathless, smothering, exhausting enthusiasm (others available upon request … but you get my drift.) We were enthusiastic to the point of suffocation about working on the project of our first farm, and we exhibited the vigor of frantic North Pole elves at the end of November. To round out the top of our project, we bought farm ducks and some geese for the pond. It was a marvelous experience because we were learning a new and previously alien science, and it made its impact on everything else we did. By anyone's definition, the feelings that had manifested surely qualified as zeal and fervor, especially if it made everything else in life feel better - and it did indeed do that!
We danced in the streets (too old for rap and too young for waltz) as the paychecks went one by one into a savings account for the project of barn building. There was great celebration as we ate hot dogs instead of steaks at the dinner table, so that we could afford our first 5 sheep to fill the fine barn. The fact that it was a mutual project within a marriage actually made the marriage better; I can't recall a single argument in that time period and every chore that had to be done got out of the way faster because we wanted the time to work on our project. Now, that in itself is noteworthy! Instead of getting up each morning annoyed by the alarm clock, we got up with happy anticipation of the late day library visit ahead of us after work to pick up yet another book on the trials that agricultural families conquer on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis.
I found that most everyone around us did not understand the enthusiasm we displayed for this commitment, especially its intensity and total absorption of our free-time. I was then bold enough to ask some of them when they remembered last experiencing a great enthusiasm for anything important to them? The responses they gave me indicated what I felt was the direct effect of the anemic economy. Their answers included "preparing for the wedding," "getting ready for a baby" and "buying a house." Someone's child felt "buying a dog" was his best recollection. He also said he thought his mom's best enthusiasm was displayed on "grandma's babysitting nights." Almost no one stepped outside of what we used to think were the essentials of life (weddings, babies and houses,) and no one mentioned a special project to me other than these essentials. Since cars are achieved cheaply on lease these days I did not expect to hear the words "car" or "truck" and I didn’t. If I recall correctly, I asked about 15 people separately. It took me two days.
As the project of starting the farm began to unroll including the barn building, then the arrival of sheep, feeding ducks and geese, and the eventual birthing of lambs, we reveled and celebrated every minute. We were the proverbial children in the candy store picking and choosing just the right combination of details to finish the project properly and even my decorating skills came into play - little bells to hang on the wall of the barn, an Amish hex sign stapled to the Dutch door and of course endless fly strips to catch unwanted flying things. These were all positioned with precision and good taste. They were also color coordinated.
Various visitors came to us from near and far. Family descended on us from out of town one weekend after the next, so as not to be excluded from witnessing the fruits of our labor, or the wives in each branch of the family made them go. The elders in the group were kind but the younger adults were dismayed. Many expressed concerned that we would undertake this new lifestyle electively; others just shook their heads in disbelief, but in time almost all of them eventually got the message that our approach to the new place we would call home was wildly enthusiastic and their concern could not shoot that balloon down. We believed in the monster we had created; we thought we would be good at this new life and we gave it everything we had, and happily so. No one was deluded into thinking our project was chosen because it was fashionable in the neighborhood or made us fit in around our newly adopted environment. They all realized we did this project to ourselves and for ourselves, and also by ourselves. We also knew we were participating in what we thought was a dying lifestyle and were doing out part to renew or rebuild its worthiness as an American industry of the countryside; the building of the little family farm, but we were loving every minute of it and could not get enough. We called it "getting closer to the earth versus drying up in the city" and "saving the family farm in the US" even though some of our friends thought we were just oxygen depleted.
I think it is important to note that the great enthusiasm from an adventure like this manifests itself in the same way that a delightful drizzle topping of chocolate fudge smothers a plain dish of vanilla ice cream. If you are "bit by the bug" so to speak, you can't seem to do without it and then when you finally have it, it brightens everything in your life to a heightened degree. However, it is only mildly infectious to the bystander as he stands gapping at your eagerness. A portion of surrounding humanity will always shake their heads in an utter lack of appreciation for your choice of project. They will only perceive the potential exhaustion involved with your joyously adopted responsibility. Almost no one will see it as you do or through your eyes, no matter how long you make them suffer through your wide-eyed animations in explanation.
In today's world, there are some who have not seen what it is like for anyone to pass time in an aura of enthusiasm, especially one that would mimic wild zealousness. It is a state of being that should not be missed in that it is the simple beauty of people carrying out their own little project to the point of completion and management. The fact is that this is only a slightly realized experience for the common man in today's world. These same people might interpret what they are witnessing as if it were a disease process like a type of dementia, a psychic spell from a nearby jealous landowner, or something demonic from a platelet transfusion. Because they might never have seen it before, they really don't understand what they are looking at. Like everything else in life, "if you don't get it, you don't get it."
We live in times where money has been "strange" for about 30 years on and off, up and down, in and out. The intensity of one's preoccupation of choice tends not to be so emotionally embracing under a near-depression economy. As you can recall there was a surefooted interdependence between big projects from the past with the availability of cash, and as there is less cash available these days, you can see that there is less excitement. Not many know how to "do it" without "having it." Where did the days go when if you wanted to do a project badly enough, you simply resolved that it would be done no matter what type economy prevailed or how long it took you to achieve the end result, and you were willing to do it anyway you could - short of sticking up a gas station.
This trend of rationalizing your desires and moving ahead with your dreams seems to be almost dead in America; however, I remember hearing about it prevailing in the Great Depression after the initial shock of poverty turned into normalcy for the living and breathing left behind. I feel that our series of economic recessions have come and gone one right after the other, always with the promise of returning to prosperity in between. We never really made it up for air after one recession before we were thrown down again into the next recession. We are left, therefore, hard pressed to expect any sonic rainbows to appear in our imagination just because we think we would like to do something. No one seems to have reinvented the art of investing all your spirit and cleverness to achieve your fervent dream when we are busy bobbing up and down between this promise and that promise from the government, CNN and the banking industry. As fate has decided to hand us 30 years of economic see-saws, it has not given us the chance to teach ourselves that we must use one method (prosperity with plenty of cash,) or the other method (in poverty using our own wits because that's all there is to work with) for achieving a goal. Alas, most of us have given up manifesting passion for inventing a dream altogether.
We either need longer periods of truly reliable prosperity in this country or longer periods of recession and depression to return to the days of wild adult-quality enthusiasm and ingenuity. Either option will work, as each will foster its own kind of zealousness - one lifestyle will cause us to plan cheaply and the other will bring it about more expensively, but from a standpoint of just reinventing "the phenomenon of great individual planning - equals the enthusiasm that accompanies the goal - equals the achievement of said goal," either option (extreme hunger or extreme lavishness) will return us to the days of "intense and eager interest" as one's brain has the time to adjust to having money or not having money and how to survive in each case. If we could only know for longer than 4 years at a time if we are really meant to live rich or really meant to live poor, we might actually get a handle on how to do what with an idea (if we can remember how ideas are formulated when we get there.) If I remember correctly, I first heard the term "couch potato" in 1992. Man without method is equal to doldrums; the best definition of a couch potato I can give you is someone drowning by inability and incapability and this is what our economy has done to the last two generations. We live on sitcoms and reality TV because we can't even generate dreams. What's the point; we don't know how to carry out what we think about anyway, so why think?
Remember that 25 years is still considered an entire generation worth of time. In other words, Mom and Dad's latest saturation issue may not be exciting to their grown children, not because the kids think their parents are "square," but because the children grew up in times that were so financially challenged that those same children may have never seen saturation before - a mode of excitement defeated from its inception by the ongoing expense of raising a family in times that you cannot depend on. I'm hoping that you conclude almost any project within reason can be pulled off if you can determine how much money is needed to complete it, how much money is coming into your house, how much money really needs to go out in maintenance (food, utilities, rent, mortgage,) and how much more money you can make for your new goal if you need a second job to do it. It also helps to know where to buy what you need cheaply for the new set-up if you are in a down time financially. If times unexpectedly get better, you will always know how to hire someone to have in shipped in instead of picking it up yourself.
Even employing the principal behind, "no pain, no gain," the truth is that it is still the hardest thing in the world to give everything, but usually the only way to get everything. Take heart however, because ingenuity is still willing to be your friend! Our way of giving up everything was to slim expenses down to one telephone, eating hot dogs and homemade cheeseburgers instead of steak and salmon, and then living with only one car. I'm sure that there are many more sympathetic or supportive clichés orbiting around than "no pain, no gain" from the time when money was more readily available in pockets, frequently found in banks that would lend, and cash taken from Aunt Suzie's inheritance now ready to squander. For instance, one could reflect on, "If you want it done right, call a professional!" from days that were easier to roll with. Even so, close your eyes for a moment and I will offer for your consideration (if you can read with your eyes closed) the beauty of investing your own planning, time spent learning how to do it right, and hard earned money to pull off your desires. That used to be the American way, remember? The benefits of this method should be obvious even to the idiot. These days I find it less than obvious even to the celebrated genius. How to finance a project has become a lost art, so people go without their projects financed and without their dreams fulfilled, and at last become dull altogether. "The banks aren't lending!" Their philosophy is when the banks don’t lend, projects don’t get done. They will always be ready to criticize others who find a way to do it in spite of not borrowing money , but will never be ready to promote their own dream even after you have proven that you were able to finance your project a different way. Most of all, people disdain from sharing their inspired dreams with friends these days lest they be labeled as idiots themselves. "Yeah, how is he going to finance that!" is the expected response to the dreamer. The average Joe does not want to think about giving everything to get everything; he wants to talk about when prosperity is next expected to return and describe how big and easily completed the project will be when there is more venture capital available to borrow.
There is still time to transplant the formula for this lack of awareness into the souls of the project-planning ignorant, and in a way that 20+ and 30+ year old adults can clearly appreciate. To make it fun, try telling them to buy generic cream cheese instead of named brands on a weekly basis, and tell them it will save them $250 a year. From that alteration alone they could finance their next wild and crazy project but it would have to cost about $250. If they don't have "surround sound" yet in every bathroom of their house or apartment, this might be an attractive challenge. If they eat bagels for breakfast they will recognize the logic in using cream cheese as an instrument by which to save money; after all, a bagel breakfast is a meal where the cream cheese really flows. If they keep their trial goal small as you suggest, it will take exactly one year to learn how something can still come from nothing - or at least be less painful than they anticipated! If brand name cream cheese is too close a challenge to their taste sensitivities, tell them to try the experiment with margarine or cooking spray. They must perform this for one year or they will never yield the learning experience they will need in the future, and will not be able to multiply or divide what they got from the learning experience for larger projects down the road.
Even though bagels and cream cheese were not known as the breakfast of choice in 1794 when our infant country was depleted of funds following the Revolutionary War, the Cotton Gin was still invented as the brainchild of Eli Whitney, who was experiencing belt tightening just like the rest of post-war America. Furthermore, who had funds after the economic drainage of the Civil War for dynamite and typewriters to arrive on the scene? Certainly not the inventors. Founding fathers and others thereafter operating in low capital-flow environments like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison both died in circumstances that were considered relative poverty, but they created and created and created while they were alive. The former was a US president who lost a phenomenal library collection he had socked away all his life to settle his expenses before he died (which became the inspiration and initial ingredients for the Library of Congress.) That loss, in fact, turned into something good for the nation, but it was not good for him and gave him chest pain. The latter, who almost had none of his inventions credited to him because he was too involved with his inventing to know about the phrase "patent pending," spent everything he could raise to invent electric lights. Anyway, as you can see great things still occurred in times of rough economies fostered by people who could really think a project through, made a living at it, but were not altogether as solid planners as the times required. What I am trying to stress here is that you don't have to be poor after you achieve your goal. Here in lies the formula for success: Know who you are, where you are, where you want to go, what you will need to get there, and then don't forget to figure out how to survive when the initial plan turns to ongoing management or when your project is not as productive as you had hoped for, taking a few more years to get off the ground. My mother used to say, if you want to buy a house for $1,000,000, try to secure $2,000,000 before you sign on the dotted line. This might be what Jefferson and Edison forgot to do. For those of us who do not speak about money in digits that resemble telephone numbers, I will add to be careful not to wipe yourself out.
Continue to renew your planning as you go along; things that change without you realizing it can throw you and your project into the garbage heap if you are not careful. This is the last component to people's fear about planning to secure their dreams. So, do something about it! When you hit a snag, don't just throw your arm's up in disgust. After all, generic cream cheese helped you out once and it may help you out again, or you could just put a little more away for a "rainy day" in case you need it.
On a lighter note, the smallest children who came to visit from the time we were finally open for business, found the little sheep farm great entertainment and a swell place to run and jump. They loved the baby lambs, but they also loved the gait that swung open and closed on the pasture, they loved climbing up and picking wild raspberries on the little backhoe hills that were never hoed back, and they loved sliding down the railing on the deck banister while it was new enough not to give splinters through blue jeans. In other words, the project was enthusiastically accepted by small children because it was either totally different from what they knew or totally different from what they expected. Let's not forget that all methods of living life for the small child (including tending a sheep farm in your side yard) are new anyway to varying degrees. It either makes them cry from fear or laugh from entertainment, so laughter and wonder in the minds of the littlest amongst us might be deceiving and does not necessarily indicate approval, but more like discovery.
There was a significant membership to the mumbling observer's gallery who could not tolerate any of this experience. They looked at their visit as a duty. They wanted only to get out of their air conditioned cars, get into our air conditioned house through the attached garage, heat up a microwave dinner, watch a movie, complain of high-elevation headaches at only 1850 feet, and finally fall asleep on the living room couches, much to the delight of the rest of us. We, now confined to the downstairs family room, were willing to eat a homemade pizza at 1/3 of the pizzeria price, sit up all night reliving our achievements with any mentation-capable house guest, followed by early church service the next morning and praising God for his many blessings to us.
We performed a study on the visitor groups above, and our results were as follows:
1) Of the very involved and originally responsible project-inventing subdivision from the adult group (two people) we found ourselves to be 100% total absorbed with overwhelming enthusiasm and joy in our activities. We felt this was demonstrated by the fact that the harder parts of the project were inhaled at a much quicker rate than the easier parts. This is always a tip off! When the harder parts of a project are more comfortably performed at a faster rate than the easier tasks which have now become almost boring in a completely new lifestyle, it is secondary to "euphoria" which sets one notch higher than enthusiasm and is sometimes labeled as a type of madness. In fact, we felt better about ourselves and things we had to deal with in life because this exercise brought about a significant boost in self-esteem and it made life flow as beautifully as the project was flowing. All of these described components offered tangible documentation of 100% saturating involvement on the part of the inventing committee.
A lesser point of concern but still a fact of interest and worthy of mention here is that city people by nature are intrigued and sometimes saddened by "extinction" perceived and/or advertised. Historically, they will donate whatever they can manage to endorse a mission for bringing `relief to a project that fosters awareness and the eventual reversal of a attern of disappearance: "Save the whales," "save the polar bear," "save the family size sheep farm," etc. This incentive often tricks people into becoming overly-enthusiastic about ideas and projects that are not possible to achieve, but by about half way through your study on how to achieve your goal, you should be able to delineate whether the project is truly achievable at all. Of course we could have simply campaigned to save whales and donated our saved earnings and efforts for marches down Park Avenue South and attended charity dinners, or struggled to do our part for marine biologists by sending money over the internet, but we chose to raise sheep instead. This might be a simplistic example but it surely makes the point for the first time personal project enthusiast.
2) Of the group that had nothing to do with creating or carrying out the project, but came to observe it when it was completed and could actually follow what all the hoopla was about from having survived a few projects of their own, we found 28% to be smiling, hand-clapping and genuinely enthusiastic-for-us adults. They visibly enjoyed seeing people able to accomplish this quality lifestyle alteration and the achievement of a private goal. This group was generally 80 and older. The other 72% of the adults were not enthusiastic about the project but were a slightly more positive than being totally bored. At the very least, they listened to our endless explanation of how we pulled it off and they did not fall asleep in the process. Within that group there was a small percentage who we felt were just being polite, or smiling perhaps was just infectious that day. These candidates included several clergy ladies, whose common charge from their profession was to support any idea from the congregation that did not break the Ten Commandments or promote un-Christian living. As we made our phone calls to "Rent-A-Ram" for the next birthing several months after the pastoral visits, these ladies were not imposed upon to witness any displays of life in the barn that they might find objectionable from their perspective.
3) Of the small children's group, we found 100% genuinely involved with looking at the barn, the lambs, the mother ewes feeding the lambs, and precariously swinging on the pasture gate in unison, not necessarily in that order (depending on the size of the group on any given day.) Some were colicky or, as yet, not socially adjusted so they cried in fear to touch a lamb, which would have been their norm anyway, and no head counts were collected from this group for the purpose of our study, even though it was tempting because most of them were smiling. We felt including them in a data collection would better support the goal of a day care center than our project, so we left them out.
4) Back again to the adult group, there was another subdivision that was totally burned out almost immediately by the project, which we will call the "microwave dinner subdivision" from the above narrative. These people included adult children of the project inventors, their spouses, their bridesmaids, their wedding ushers and other friends. We found that only 7% even knew we had a barn or sheep before they arrived, in spite of the fact that they were thoroughly briefed, frequently updated and were sent proud evidence in the form of pictures, hand written notes of explanation and carefully photocopied articles from trade pamphlets. In other words, they did not know why they were coming to visit us to begin with, and brought their own video movies because we had a big screen. One member of this subdivided group claimed that after looking at the farm, she found the whole experience horrible because in order for sheep to eat they had to put their mouths on the ground and into stalls of hay and grain. The impact of this proclamation on the project creators was similar to banging a dirty sponge on a clean window, but we survived that assessment from whence it came.
In closing, fervor and zeal survived the visits and even continued in the project-inventing group of two people, as we ran through snow covered meadows to get the sheep fed and other barn duties done. The snow was four feet for weeks at a time but true "intense and eager interest" persisted for a period of five years. Barn cleaning was done a little less zealously and was, at first, performed by sympathetic neighbor farmers who felt we were inept, and that we required hands-on demonstrations to learn how this was done properly. Following these demonstrations, the actual barn cleaning was performed by hired teenagers who never felt they were paid enough. Notwithstanding our great enthusiasm for barn cleaning, our backs did not hold out as we shoveled sawdust and animal droppings which turned out to be heavier than we anticipated especially when wet, which was always, so we paid to have it done. Sadly after 5 years, newly developed allergies put the kibosh on the whole project and the sheep were shipped out, although the barn remains standing and strong to this day 16 years later.
What insight is yielded here as we summarize?
1. When you are truly invested in a project, (heart, mind and pocketbook,) do not expect more than 16% of the on-looking population to acknowledge your enthusiasm as they simply cannot identify with your fervor. The current economic trends do not allow for previous experiences in their lives to compare to your experience and what it took to pull it off. Since they have no personal recollections to superimpose your glee upon for comparison, you can expect vague smiles, empty stares and that they will inevitably drink more of your wine and beer to beat the boredom.
2. True project enthusiasm must not be allowed to be challenged by the reactions of those around you. If their reactions get too much for you to bear then get rid of these people who would descend upon you with sour faces. Just don't invite them or pretend you are going out to a sheep conference today (or whatever applies to your preoccupation.) Give up looking for acceptance. What counts is that you are happy. Why should you need confirmation from others? You could however try something unique to produce a type of souvenir of on-lookers visit to you if you have a few bucks left at the end of your initial investment, for example, T-shirts that say, "Save the family sheep farm!" This might induce some affiliated interest as the wet mops of the world contemplate how the shirt would blend into their wardrobe, and even in tight economic times, people are still trying to make outfits with their clothes. Should you choose this option, please select a currently popular color for the shirt, like perhaps purple. They can then feel invested in the project while they parade around their home communities displaying "a true cause" upon their chests or backs, and wearing the color of royalty.
3. Remember "it is harder to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven," (ref. Mark 10:25.) So you can spend every dime you have on doing this, eating hot dogs until you are blue, but when you die it does not mean you will naturally ascend upward unless perhaps you ate the "Hebrew National" brand of dog to save money. This may in turn buy you some points on the Day of Judgment, as their manufacturer has advertised that he "answers to a higher power" for at least two decades that I can remember. In the interim between life and judgment, try to keep the barn clean any way you can for points in having provided for the innocent lambs.
4. Choose projects that will give you and your partner a good time and a good feeling; those that speak to your inner child are the best because you might wind up doing it and enjoying it completely by yourselves and only in each other's company. This is one of those rare conditions under which you can shut out the world and have fun. Savor the experience and keep the enthusiasm alive.
5. Celebrate life to your heart's content within the rules of good living. We only pass through this place once they say - eliminate from your life all sadness and frustration that other people would impose. Make your projects come alive, and may you realize the achievement of all your ambitions.
Alice Elizabeth Cagle, August 17, 2010
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