Opportunity

We've been talking about labor and fertility in the past few days, aho how both fertility and labor (understood this as work, be this paid, unpaid or indirectly paid, or paid by means other than money) are knit together and vital for us both as individuals as well as economies, communities, groups or even mankind. Indeed we understand that without labor and fertility, life as we know it wouldn't be possible. It is through these that the things we need to live are produced. The food we consume, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the furniture we use, the roads and means of transportation, and currently even a large part of our communication means. The current development of knowledge - or any knowledge, actually - wouldn't be possible without labor and fertility.

At the same time, labor and fertility have a price, and that's effort and dedication. It entails resilence, patience and the determination to continue, to work hard and do the best possible constantly, even when the results are not seen at once. Lands need a lot of work for them to yield a good harvest, and that often means many years of poor - if any harvest before the bouty of the land showers upon us with the richness and goodness of Mother Earth. At our office job - perhaps seeming so far from the creation of God - are also ruled by the same Golden Principle, and so we often have to work our backs off for a meager wage, a little payment and no recognition, before we stablish ourselves and see the fruits of our efforts. It's not an easy road, but it is the road, and so it can be hard often to see others who have found shortcuts, and reach those fruits and that bounty in a shorter time or a different, easier way. A friend of mine would often say "it's not your time or my time, but God's Time the one that matters", to refer to such cases where we feel things don't go as fast or as slow as we would want them to go.

However, not everybody is willing to wait on God's Schedule to arrive to the bounty of the harvest, nor they want to invest any effort, dedication or hard work to get what they want. These people are the "opportunity hunters". With wide eyes clouded by dreams of greatness, they often look down on the hard working ants and say it so, thinking that working hard to get what you want, live on a tight but stabile way, work for someone else or be "employed" is degrading and take you nowhere. The perspective of working hard for five or ten years to save up for a home - for instance - or for a promotion so that you can take yourself or your family to the next level of comfort , equals to eternal stagnation, where you will forever be condemned to a life of endless struggle, tiresome working and deep poverty, stuck in the same rented room or in your parents' basement. They consider that opportunities are fleeting things that you have to grab when they flash before your eyes, and squeeze all you can from them, placing value on those chances where you can get the biggest earning out of the less amount of effort.

Several opportunities then start appearing, all of them quite risky, often schemes or bogus enterprises designed to fool people to take their money or make them work for free, or become the escape goat when the truth about the activity is discovered, to down right illegal activities. Such are the people who compulsively spend all their begged up money on lottery tickets because they expect to become millionaires through it, those who enter all sorts of pyramid companies or invest in ponzy schemes, to those who start prostituting themselves or serving as drug mules and smuglers. In times of high unemployment, but even in times when the economy is well, those who can't find a job or are not willing to take one, are often seduced by these sort of proposals. Quick money and the right pitch sale to blur the risks, can make it seem as the best idea in the planet, or at least not as bad as many would think. Like I noted in the post "Beware of the Tricky", not everybody is able to do the right questions, nor is able to notice that the pitch sale lines are designed to take away their attention from the obvious flaws your common sense would warn you about.

Why isn't in the news how many people has gone rich in a matter of days for doing this? Why can't be explains clearly and shortly what this is or how it works? Why aren't there more millionaires from the lottery, when every week there should be a winner for each of the games available? Where are the millionaires that the Casino produces?

Many articles in magazines and on the net, often talk about the dark world of prostitution, or nightclub dancers, strippers and drug mules. There's also the world of people who take shortcuts at their jobs or steal. Cashiers slipping part of the day's income into their pockets, or stiffing the clients for their benefit, warehouse workers who loit from the stocks, drivers who "drop" part of their cargo and so on. The general mantra is "No Game, no Gain", or "No Risk, No Earnings", as if really, you had to put your life on the dice everytime, risk all you have to get some sort of benefit, unless you are left only with that you started. It drives you to expect something from what you can't control, no can't influence in anyway, instead of seeking a more safe thing, where though many things you can't control, at least you have control - and therefore responsability! - over a part of it, thus allowing you to ensure the end result.

You can buy a thousand lottery tickets and never win anything, and but a thousand more and remain with the same result, or spend your whole life buying tickets and never win a dime, but spend all the money you get on it. You could also work the land hard, day after day, and do it for five years without results, but eventually - according to what you've planted, and within an expected amoount of time - the land will yield and produce and your efforts will be paid for, assuring your from then on the fruits of your labor. So, why to chase fleeting opportunities that could turn into smoke and mirrors, hoax or traps that leave you in trouble or in shame, when there's a God given way, and take it on the Land, on Mother Earth and partake in the fertile activity of labor?

Sometimes those "bright, smart out" ideas are the most stupid of all.