Rinse, Lather, Repeat

I spent most of the day doing yard work at my mother-in-law's cabin up North, mowing what has got to be the steepest hill imaginable. The weather was beautiful at the lake, and the breeze was nice, but the only thing I could think about as I was mowing was, "I'm going to have to do this again...and again...and again, all summer long."

Despite my gloominess as I plodded along behind the mower, when it was finished, I felt a certain satisfaction of a job well done. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd be doing it all over again soon enough. It made me think of the common directions on a shampoo bottle - rinse, lather, repeat - only my reality was something even more mundane - mow, trim, repeat.

I remember reading an article several years ago about the guy that invented vertical blinds. This inventor was photographed in his warehouse full of junk where he imagined new ways to attack old problems. He had hundreds of patents to his name, but the one that made him the big bucks was vertical blinds.

What really struck me was a counter-intuitive statement he made about inventors. He said that the most basic requirement for an inventor is that they must be innately lazy. His reasoning was that the greatest inventions make the things we do easier in some way. In fact, vertical blinds were born out of laziness. He said he was dusting his traditional mini-blinds one day, regretting that he had to do the chore at all, when he realized that if he hung the blinds vertically, he might not have to dust them ever again!

I realize that innate laziness is just a little tongue-in-cheek. It was one of the greatest inventors, Thomas Edison, that said genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. As I perspired over the grass today, I was longing for just a little bit of inspiration. None came, but I'll still be looking for it.

As I look ahead to another summer of mow, trim, repeat, I'm convinced that there's got to be a better way around this whole ordeal. Perhaps it will come to me some scorching Saturday afternoon in August; in the meantime, maybe I'll have to check into a nice rock garden.

Light it up...

Rob