EFFICIENCY AND LOVE [M, 4-14-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—EFFICIENCY AND LOVE [M, 4-14-25]

 

I don’t pick up my feet very well as I walk. Mostly I shuffle and scrape.

It’s not just because I’m old. I never was good at picking up my feet, even as a child. I know because I remember well my parents saying, “Pick up your feet! You’ll wear out your shoes! We can’t afford any more! You’ll have to go barefoot.”

I liked having shoes. I never enjoyed going barefoot. In part, that was because my mother often told the story of her uncle who stepped on a rusty nail and died of tetanus. So I didn’t mind taking care of my shoes. I tried to pick up my feet.

Never got any good at it. Even in basketball, and baseball, and pickle ball, and long-distance running. The friends of our teen daughters called me “The Red Phantom,” because I wore red running shoes and just glided along, barely above the ground.

I liked shoes, but I never wanted a lot of them. I was never a “shoes horse,” although when I was a kid on the farm, we had a horse that got new shoes more often than I did. Too many shoes, or too much of anything, requires too many decisions. That defeats efficiency.

Sister Mary Jean of St. Mary of the Woods bemoaned the modernization of the Sisters of Providence in the 1960s. In addition to their traditional black habit, they added a dark blue version and even a light blue habit. “It’s awful,” Sister Mary Jean moaned, “having to decide every day which color to wear. It’s not efficient at all.”

That resonated with me. I preferred to think of my low gait not as laziness or inability but as efficiency. Maybe that’s why personal efficiency has always been a hobby for me. I try to take a shower, get dressed, pick up the mail, drive the car… whatever… in the most efficient way possible.

Now my learning to shuffle and scrape along with minimal outlay of energy is really paying off, since the old person shuffle is about the only way my feet will move

The problem with efficiency, though, according to psychiatrist Gerald May, is that it gets in the way of love. We become so fixated on efficiency that we don’t recognize love when someone offers love to us, since love usually isn’t very efficient.

May says that efficiency is the how of life, love is the why of life. That sounds like absolute truth, something to remember. Now, what’s the most efficient way to remember that?

John Robert McFarland

1] We were friends with the nuns of St. Mary of the Woods when I was the Methodist campus minister in Terre Haute, at Indiana State U and Rose Polytechnic Institute, now Rose-Hulman University. We did so many programs and adventures together, I felt that I was the Methodist campus minister at St. Mary of the Woods, too,