I sometimes have a hard time going to sleep. Thus, I am listening to Bolero, one of my favorite musical pieces. It has a variety of beautiful instruments playing the chorus, and it blends so well It even gives me goosebumps. There is nothing wrong with a love of classical music. It reminds us of the days of yore when life was simpler. By simpler, I mean that the world was not modernized. If you wanted to hear a song like this, you had to go to where it was being performed live. While that is still a favorite past-time, it is by far not the only way. I often think about what life was like in those times. Sure people worked, but minds were rarely, if ever, idle. Working the fields or at early factories was difficult labor. They both had their dangers, but people were more proud of what they did. Now a lot of those jobs have been replaced by machines.

I remember talking to elderly people in Southeast Missouri several years ago. Cotton is an important crop for the region, and Southeast Missouri is the only part in which it can be grown. The area was once a swamp. It has since been drained, leave one of the most fertile areas in the US. It's amazing. People grow crops all the way to their houses. Around here, there are a lot more cattle. Just imagine what is was like even 150 years ago when cotton was picked by hand. Phonographs had not even been invented yet, so there was not a way to listen to songs. Church was the main place where people could listen to music at all, aside from occasions when a band would play, but most of the people in that particular region would not have been close enough had never been to an opera or a symphony. While such things were probably available in St. Louis and Memphis, it is unlikely that any of them traveled often. What takes two hours now, took many hours, and most would probably not heave heard of Ravel. In fact, he would not even have been born until 17 years. Still, little changed, and the phonograph was very new at the time of his birth. Essentially, they would have been a luxury for the rich.

It makes you stop and think. We have reached a stage where our understanding of science is improving daily. Computers are slowly taking over, and we are the root cause. Yet, it seems that we are just as stressed as our ancestors if not more so. This has shown that we are anxious creatures by nature. Even with all the modernization, we're still explorers as we have always been. It took many millenia to travel from the Old World to the new world. Many faced disease and starvation to make such journeys, yet we bitch about things when we have it so much easier. The only reason why the world was simpler was because people worked to survive. Fields had to be plowed with simple devices, and seeds were planted by hand. Now machines, under our guidance, perform these tasks for us. Yet we take it all for granted and forgot about our roots. As our intelligence grows, we become closer to two separate paths. One leads to further progression while the other leads to death. Science can save us, but it can also destroy us. These are our main worries unlike people who lived 150 years ago. I'm sure they sometimes complained, but they were more likely to have a good reason.