by J. R. Practix

Accumulate: (v.) to gather together or acquire an increasing number or quantity

It all comes down to what you’re gathering together.  In my mind, accumulation is associated with rain or snow. I guess one could accumulate great wealth.

But we rarely talk about accumulating intangibles. For instance, we don’t accumulate friends. We don’t really accumulate a sense of well-being.

Too bad. It’s not so much that the best things in life are free–it’s just that when we finally work our tails off to earn the things we think are best, we’re too exhausted to enjoy them.

So it’s really smart to accumulate things that don’t take a whole lot of effort, but instead, have a great pay-off. Matter of fact, it might be fun to tie a number to them. In other words:

• Getting an ice cream cone at Burger King for fifty cents is a 3 in effort and a 10 in accumulation.
• Working 40 hours a week at my job is a 10 in effort and a 3 in accumulation.
• Sitting through a church service?? Well, that’s a toughie. I’m afraid that often it’s a 9 in effort and a 2 in accumulation.
• Listening to a politician tout his or her programs–well, I think you get the idea.

We have found the secret to life, have we not? So how can I invest my daily bread of energy effectively to accumulate the better mixture of tangible holdings and intangible blessing? Quite frankly, we become grumpy if we have to work too hard to get so little.

You have to admire the heavens, which simply open up the clouds and dump whatever is available–hot OR cold. They don’t apologize or put forth extreme, strenuous effort. They just rain. They just snow. But in the meantime, we receive accumulation.

That’s what I want to be. Without coming across too weird or ethereal, if I could just be a cloud that floats along until it’s my time to dump my precipitation and then relax and let it flow–I would be happy.

Human life is too often spent determining what we want to do, fussing about it, arguing over it and planning it–only to be disappointed in the end at the turn-out. What if we flipped it? What if we put LESS effort in an attempt to get more results?

For when it’s all said and done, people will look back on our time of occupying terra firma and said, “What did they accumulate?”

If we make it look easy, we might encourage somebody to do more–instead of scaring them away from excellence.