When Life Slows Down

When Life Slows Down

Just some personal observations that might help me and you in the future…..

I remember the first time I lived in Okinawa, Japan.

Today I am aged 66.  The present year is 2014.

It was in the early 1970’s.

Later I also lived there in the mid - 1980’s.

Even later I visited Japan in the late 1980’s.

All was while I was in USA  military service.

There are several things I remember that might help me and you these days, especially if times should get harder.

One is barracks life. It is to our advantage to “get along” as best we can when living and working in a communal situation. Often there are people we live and work with who are from different backgrounds than what we are from. They often even like different foods. They are even sometimes prejudiced against other people, locally most often.

Second is working more than five days a week. In a crazy sort of way, that did fill the time, since we all need something to do that keeps us busy, and why not be productive, too. My second time there, we only worked five days a week, so I chose sports and alcohol abuse and sometimes debauchery to fill my time. As to debauchery, there were plenty of American and foreign women who thought the same way, it seems.

Third was the speed limit. The average speed was 40 KPH (kilometers per hour) which is around 25 MPH (miles per hour).  For an American, that was too slow…..but I got used to it enough to where I liked it after about three months.  One just plans more time for travel, and uses that time to think, etc. Even the superhighway was finished during my second time there, and there was a toll for even driving on this road. The initial speed limit was 50 KPH (around 35 MPH) but did get bumped up to like 55KPH (around 40 MPH the way I drove). When I had to pay the toll, I later and generally chose to use the “free” local roads, with the 40 KPH speed limits.

Fourth was the telephone service. On my first time living there, the service was unreliable, and it might take multiple tries to connect a phone call from one end of the island to another (and then we might get cut off).  Even calling home to the USA was problematic at best. We used the MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System (basically amateur radio with a lot of dedicated volunteers to make it work)), and it just depended on the atmospherics at the time. I myself had one demeaning MARS experience, which I will never forget.  Later in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, what with satellites and fiber optic undersea cables, I could all home reliably to Atlanta from Mt. Fuji in Japan and Manila in the Philippines .  I had just finished the Manila Marathon and finished at Rizal Park by Manila Bay, by the way.

A lesson learned on Family communications with loved ones is to have a safe and reliable central hub we all can use to trade information. The most probable situations in the world are hurricanes/typhoons, tornadoes, and wildfires. We all want to know how it sorted out, mostly for our loved ones.

Fifth was enjoying the slower speeds when I biked over 2,000 kilometers.  I only was hit one time (by a car), and the slower speeds did help a lot. I was not hurt very much.

Sixth was getting used to driving on the other side of the road. That was not to hard for me, but the ingrained instinct about which way to look when crossing the road (as a pedestrian) was never reliably overcome by me.

Last, I swore I would maintain being slower when I returned to the USA in the later years I expected. . I failed in that effort, kind of. Things are just faster here, it seems.  And I accommodated.

But being slower, and should times get harder, it might be a good attitude to have. For example I had a grandfather (my mother’s father) who ran a General Store during his time (circa 1900). Every so often he would drive a wagon, pulled by animals into Nashville, to resupply his store. The effort took at least two or three days. That was normal, then.