Decline of Picnics: Another Canary in the Coal Mine

Picnic--the joyful experience of eating good food in the open air while enjoying the company of friends and family in a relaxed atmosphere--is on the wane in the western world. More of us gather around the barbecue in the back yard. More still don't eat outside at all, or migrate from the inside of our favourite restaurant to its summertime patio.

Picnicking is practised most by first and second generation immigrants for whom this tradition still holds value. A fast-paced lifestyle that makes no time for relaxed appreciation of what others have to offer us and what we can happily share with them finds no room for picnics. Unlike back yard barbecues, picnics were usually held in beautiful natural environments.

Traditionally, picnics were a way for extended families to get together to share stories and get caught up on each other's affairs when no home was large enough to hold the group. The gathering had to be held outdoors to accommodate so many people.

In addition to lacking time, today's city people have little interest in their extended family members, so "catching up" would be considered a waste of time. We tend to associate with those relatives who can benefit us through their own influence or their respective contact networks.

While we in the western world supposedly support "family values," as a society we lack appreciation for the value of the family itself. Thus we find picnics with extended family members unnecessary, if not anachronistic and inconvenient.

Picnics became popular in the 19th century, before cell phones with text messaging, before VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phones that allow us to speak in real time with people in any part of the world that has internet connection, before televisions, even before radio. In general, they were large get-togethers held in the warmer months so people could engage in simple forms of fun together. They usually had a specific purpose, always social, involving an extended family, a church group, a service club or a Sunday school.

Not all picnics were of this nature. Some were simply single family outings, usually to scenic spots, where people sprawled on blankets and ate al fresco, which gave the food a special characteristic you couldn't get at home. Some said "It's the sunshine" that made picnic food taste so good, for others it was the open air that did not wreak of city smells.

While family picnics were well planned for food--the feature form of entertainment for the event--the extended family or group picnic was more potluck. Each family brought a lot of one or two things--like a potluck supper--and everyone ate from what was at hand. As much as the kids hoped that every family would bring dessert, it never happened. Moms were too careful to let that happen.

Every picnic had its downside, whether it was rain, ants or forgetting the condiments for the potato salad. The odd time they even stirred up old resentments among family members. But in times past--less so today--people were willing to set aside those differences (most of the time) in order to recognize the value of family.

After all, when tragedy struck, it was your family you turned to for support. Today people don't believe that tragedy will ever strike them and are shocked when it does, leaving them alone in the world without a support system to turn to. Picnics, in a sense, were an indicator of the interdependence of the community.

Extended family picnics were social occasions. Staying in touch with extended family--grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, second cousins, kissing cousins and the children of them all--had value. As most single families ate meals together at home, social occasions were not necessary for them in the same way.

How did single family picnics get started? One theory is interesting.

Today, cemeteries are lonely places where few people go to express their grief for the loss of a loved one other than for the actual burial ceremony. After that, cemeteries tend to be more places where teenagers can hang out without parents or security oversight. And, in some cases, where drugs may be bought and used apart from prying eyes.

Cemetery plots are cared for, indefinitely, by cemetery staff through a fund purchased when the plot itself is bought. That development happened within my own lifetime. When I was a kid, families had to look after the grave sites of family members and others they once cared for. Cemetery plots were tended by the loved ones left behind when someone died.

As caring for grave sites often involved some travelling as parents and children became separated over time, especially with young people flocking to cities as older parents tended to stay in more rural areas, it may have happened only once or twice a year that a family would make a trip to the cemetery to tend to the grass and plant flowers around the grave site.

There was clearly work involved in only tending to a grave site a couple of times each year. Everyone's help was needed, even from the kids. As the whole process took some time, food and beverage were brought to get people through the event. Food and beverage became the second focus of the visit.

As few people believed that real people--as opposed to discarded and decaying bodies--were in the graves, tending the graves of family members (often several generations of them in the same cemetery) was a solemn occasion--just plain work--unless something was done to lighten up the day.

Food and beverage did that. So did playing games after the meal. In those early days of picnics, cemeteries were not supposed to be as quiet and sedate as churches. It was quite all right to have fun there after the gardening and open air dining were over.

People enjoyed the non-gardening part of the event so much that they chose to have other picnics, such as at a beach or in a park or other natural setting. This happened more as people had more leisure time. They felt they could be more natural, more relaxed, less guarded, while enjoying themselves in the open air, surrounded by natural beauty.

Today we don't have picnics much, so we have to consciously teach our children about nature or they don't learn the lessons. The less they know about nature, the more inclined they are to look away as big corporations clear cut forests, create great fissures covering many hectares with open pit mining and freely pollute the air and waterways with their waste. And we eat food produced using growth hormones, pesticides and chemicals with names so long they're hard to pronounce let alone understand what they mean and what their long term effects on our bodies are.

Picnics may have been imperfect, but they were pure. We can't say that about many things in our lives any more.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what to teach their children that schools don't teach, and when is the best time to teach these lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The Secret Law of Abundance

The secret of the law of abundance is this: In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give.
- Norman Vincent Peale, inspirational writer and speaker (1898-1993)

I confess that I have never heard of the "law of abundance" other than in this quote. The number of citations on Google is so great I conclude that many authors and speakers have used it for their own particular objectives, to lend greater credence to their arguments. The fact that Dr. Peale calls this law "secret" is nothing more than hyperbole.

However, the weakening of the first part of the quote takes nothing away from the second and more significant part. " In order to receive and appreciate the good things of life, you must first give."

This sounds counterproductive to anyone who was raised in a strongly capitalist society, where "Pay yourself first" is the prime rule for entrepreneurs and "Take as much as you can get" is the general rule for both business and personal lives.

Surely it doesn't make sense to give away what you have earned in order to get more of "the good things of life." That's true. At least it's true if you believe that the most important things in life--the "good things"--are either money or what can be bought with money.

Can money buy happiness? This debate has been ongoing for so long that it bores most people. No, many people say, but I'd like to suffer with more of that kind of unhappiness.

Does tickling a child make that kid happy? Does laughter alone give evidence of happiness? The feeling we get when someone tickles us comes from the same source as pain, from the same nerves, along the same pathways. Tickling and pain are essentially the same sensation, only pain is felt with greater intensity. If tickling and pain come from the same source, then the laughter from tickling by someone cannot be misconstrued as happiness. Happiness and pain/tickling must be different.

The joy people have from getting money, from keeping money and from spending money are all like tickling. They are all transient, all insubstantial, all subject to change in a flash. As with the sensation from tickling, the joy of money stops in a flash when the motivation stops.

A close friend expressed grief to me recently, explaining how much his "nest egg" investments in the stock markets had dropped so much in value as a result of the recession in the US. Not a single other factor in his life has changed except for the current value of his investments, but he has lost sleep over it. The fact that history shows that stock markets always recover and move to greater values means nothing to him because the value of his stocks today is much lower than it was a year ago. The tickle he felt a year ago has become his pain of today.

That's not happiness. Nor should it rightly be considered worthy of unhappiness, pain or grief.

Money is no more one of the good things in life than the shirt you are wearing right now. You might miss your shirt if you lost it or it wore out, but you know that you can get another. You can always make arrangements to get more money as well, though it might take longer than buying a new shirt.

Dr. Peale said that "you must first give." That involves at least one person other than yourself. Giving to yourself is like emotional masturbation. You must give to others in order to receive and appreciate the good things of life. We even enjoy sex more when we work to make it more enjoyable for the other person. That benefit takes thought and effort, but it shouldn't cost money.

No one understands why the "law of abundance" works this way--give in order to receive more in return. It likely has something to do with our fundamental nature as social creatures. We must need each other and depend on each other to feel secure, even though logically it would seem that someone who doesn't need anyone else should be more secure. Those who feel the most secure need at least one other person, depend on at least one other person and strive to meet the needs of at least one other person.

They are happy when others around them are happy, have been made happy by something they have done themselves. That happiness returns to them, with interest.

The more we work to make others happy--not with money or what it will buy, but with love and effort--the more happy the others will be and the happier we will be in return.

The Christian Bible says "Give and ye shall receive." Now you know why. Though places of worship want money, what the Bible wants you to give is love. Give love and you will receive love in return.

No, you can't count that kind of love. But you don't have to pay tax on it either. It has no real value in monetary terms.

Have you given love in the past, but not had it return to you by the one you loved? It's highly likely that the other person was so steeped in the value of money that he or she couldn't understand the value of love. That's not your fault. Find someone else who does value the love and the happiness you have to give.

For those who believe in the value of money as the value of life, every relationship is a business relationship. Business relationships come and go based on the value that each party offers constantly and uninterruptedly to the other. That's the core of the throwaway economy.

Love should not be thrown away. True love cannot be thrown away, but business love is disposable.

Find someone who can appreciate and enjoy what you have to give of yourself. You will find it comes back to you. Over time, that joy and appreciation will increase if both parties understand and work at what Dr. Peale calls the law of abundance.

Love thy neighbour as thyself. Sound familiar? Christians will recognize it as the prime commandment of Jesus. But the same advice exists in every religion, even if the words differ slightly.

Give and you will receive. But you must give first and you must give freely, not depending on what you will receive in return. If you are looking for return, you are basing your love on the business model of love. The easy come, easy go, disposable kind.

Real love makes you feel superhuman. The best the business kind of love can make you feel is powerful. Real love helps you to understand why so many people in every culture of the world believe that there is more to existence than these body vessels we inhabit during our lifetimes. The business kind of lovers will never understand, never appreciate, never enjoy the real good things of life, either here or in some future existence.

But they may appreciate a good tickle.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can understand and appreciate the real good things of life, not just what they learn in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com