Tag Archives: accumulation

Acquire

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acquire: (v.) 1. to buy or obtain 2. to learn or develop 3. something one comes to enjoy through experience: e.g.an acquired taste

When I was moving out of my house to go on the road and realized that I needed to get my life reduced to a suitcase and a shave kit, I was immediately struck by how much STUFF I had acquired.

“Acquiring” is not the accumulation of assets. Often it is brought about by a fear of losing or a lack of assessing.

For instance, I had things in my closet which had no power for my existence. Worse, I did not remember where they came from or why I had acquired them in the first place. Yet they collected space.

It was bizarre. In a weird sense, I realized that from the moment of my birth, I was always trying to expand my three square feet of human location to bigger and bigger proportions, perhaps in order to tout my value.

After all, if you live in a 5,000-square-foot house and it is chock-full of things you’ve acquired, doesn’t that make you more important? It shouts that you are NOT a person toting a backpack or pushing a shopping cart through a park to your favorite bench. Rather, you are a respectable sort–one who possesses many different knickknacks, most of which are completely irrelevant.

It really gave me pause for thought. What DO I want to acquire?

What immediately popped into my mind was “experience.” But experience is overrated if it does not make us more flexible individuals.

I might want to acquire friendships. But actually, most of our friends are really acquaintances. Candidly, an acquaintance is someone who tells you that you look nice. A friend is someone who knows it’s nice to tell you when you look bad. So I guess I DO want to acquire friends. But how many of those will we be fortunate enough to have?

It reminds me of an old proverb: “With all your getting of knowledge, acquire wisdom.”

And what IS wisdom? Wisdom is knowing the real reason you do things–without having to make up an excuse on the fly;. Yeah, I guess THAT’S what I want to acquire.

But not too much ..,. just in case I have to move again.

Accumulate

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

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.