My life in the farms 9

My life in the farms

My life in the farm chapter

Welcome to my page (9), my life in the farms

Farms are very lonely places, it might be okay to live there for a few days, when one wants some peace and quiet; but it is not the right environment for very young men, specially if those young men need to change work later on during their life.

Dear readers, as you may know by now, we are writing these life story articles and publishing them in short stories, so, this article is the continuation of our previous article ‘my farm life chapter’; in this hub, we are also talking about my farm life in the farms of southern Italy when I was young. Anyhow, here I would like to remind you that I am going to tell you my life story just the way that I have lived it. Now, apart that this is my life story and a true life story, I need to point out that in those times life was very different from today; for this reason, to understand some of my points of view that I would like to make here, one has to try to compare the present way of life in the farms, which people are living today, to the time when I was young.

From my life experience that I am writing here I can assure you that life in the past was much harder and boring than today. I am saying this to you dear readers, because today you are living in this new and wonderful era of electronic devices, and you can choose to listen, watch or play with these electronic devices; and in doing so you may be able to enjoy yourself, and at the same time you may be able to learn something useful from them, if you put your mind to it; which is a good thing. But in those times, there was nothing similar, in fact we could not even guess that these things were going to come up and they would help humanity live a better life. So, we lived our boring and dull life and we did not even know that it was boring, in fact we thought that we were doing all right, since everybody else was doing the same things.

Therefore, I would like to say to the youths of today wherever they are, I would like to ask you this; could you just imagine a world that has no man-made electronics devises? A world with not even a single push button devise that you could amuse yourself with. Here I am talking about what we see today everywhere we go; we see people with their mobile phones doing all sort of thigs, which is wonderful, if we think about it. And then, you could compare this new way of living that we are living today, with the old ways of living, while you are doing that just ask yourself, how could anyone live in a very isolated environment where silence of human voices reigns supreme days after days, except for a few phrases every now and then. I suppose all this is hard to believe today, because wherever you go there are these electronic devices that sing to you talk to you or inform you about many things that are happening in the world. I could only say that this new way of living is a lot better that is was in the past.

Anyhow, in those times there was nothing like that, because those electronic devices that we have today, they had not been invented yet, so, life was completely different then, it was very quiet and boring and that’s how my farm-life was like when I was young, and this sort of life I had to endure in my long stay in the farm during my youth. So, let me describe a bit more about this life in the small farms of Southern Italy in those days.

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The small farms of those days

Now, let me describe a bit more how life was then. In the small family farms of those days there was no electricity for a start, so we had no electrical devices of any sort not even a portable radio to listen to, because those devices had not come out yet on the market, and even if there had been a portable radio on the market we would not be able to afford one, you see, there wasn’t any money around if you were farming in those days. I know that today it would be hard to believe what I am saying, that in those times, we the farmers could not afford to buy anything outside the bare things needed for surviving, but it was so, believe me and I had to live with it.

So, I had to grow up in this lonely environment mainly in the company of our farm animals, which they don’t talk back to you when you say anything to them, they just listen and everything ends there, even if there is a certain understanding between you and those animals, so, you may feel that you have some sort of friends, but these friends is as if they are not there. Therefore, as I grew up and became a teenager I started to realize that I was falling behind to the rest of the normal town community, in a social way. In order to understand what I am saying here, I need to explain that even though I was working in the farm every day, we were allowed to go to our home in town ones or twice a week in the evening and when we were not too busy in the farm we could also spend every second Sunday in town with the other members of our family that were permanently living in town, this is the way of life that every farmer had to endure all their life then, and this is how I was able to see and compare that I and the other youths that were in the same position as I was whished that we had a better life, so, I started to believe that we were all in a disadvantaged position, but at the same time, we could do nothing to improve it.

As I have said above, we were all in a disadvantaged position and becoming dull, as long as we were in that position there was no way of improving ourselves; here I mean everything at all could have helped us a bit, even the way of knowing what was happening in the community, which the other boys in town seemed to know everything and we seemed so dull when we were compared to them, also the ways of expressing our self clearly was not easy, since we were forced to live a lonely and taciturn way of life and therefore we did not speak much.

There were times that I wanted so badly to have a radio like the people in town, so that at least I could listen to a proper way of speech, or perhaps even a song or two, and I could improve my knowledge that way, but it was not possible. Therefore, I was stuck in that lonely world, where one is stuck for good with one’s own company and thoughts day and night for ages; this is how we used to live our young lives then, and there was not much that one could do to improve it, so, let me explain a bit more that situation:

In the farms of those days there were only a few people staying and working there, and they would go on about doing their farm duty. So, they didn’t care to talk to you, if you were much younger than them. So, as you can see, it was a very lonely place to be in such farms when one was young, as I was.

Those people which usually are staying in the farms don’t talk very much, since in their isolation there is nothing much to talk about; so, they are used to be taciturn, and there were days when only a few necessary phrases were exchanged between us; so conversation was very low indeed. Therefore, this way of life that I was living then could only result about not being satisfactory for me later in life, because I was very young and my needs would have been better served, if I had been in a more sociable place to learn a more sociable way of life, and in doing so, I could have overcome some of my personal shyness that usually follows the people that don’t talk much. So, this staying in the farm when I was young became later-on a great disadvantage for me, because it only made me grow more isolated, and in the end it made me feel even more isolated from the rest of the world; and in this isolation I had to grow up.

There were lots of times when I was alone and nobody would be near me to say a single word, and this was happening to me many days. So in my isolation I would start thinking and learning things all by myself in my own way, anything at all that came into my mind, or things that would happen in the farm, and when you are by yourself for a very long time and think by yourself for a great length of time, you don’t need to express your thoughts in words to yourself, therefore anything that you learn may start being stored within your own mind in a different way, you still learn things, perhaps even more accurate than when you learn with words: The only drawback is that when you have to speak out, lots of times you would not know what to say; not because you don’t know it, since in your mind there is a very clear picture of what you need to say; but because you find it hard finding the right words to express yourself. So this is one of the great disadvantages, which I and those youths who were unlucky like me, as they ended up working in their own families’ farms at a very early age. I am sorry to say it, but we had to put up with the hard consequences which have followed us for the rest of our lives. Now allow me to describe a bit more the farm life of those days.

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Describing our farm life

I would describe such a farm life thus:

In the farms of those days; because in the farms there are not many people to talk to, and nothing of much importance to talk about, farmers’ people are usually taciturn; and when you compare this way of life of the farmers, to the towns’ people way of life, you could feel at once the difference. You see, wherever you are in small towns people converse a lot with each other, but in the farms there seems to be a great silence of human voices, not only because there are not many people to talk to, but also because those people that are there are not interested in talking, since they are there to do their job and run the farm. So, we who happened to be living in the farms when we were young, we had to keep ourselves to ourselves, and this is how and why we became dull later on when we grew up.

So, whoever has happened to have lived in the farm as I did would have to become dull, particularly if one was as young as I was and the few people around me were much older than me, because as I said those people in the farms were there just to do their jobs, and therefore they could not and would not care about the young ones’ developing social skills, because it had nothing to do with the running of the farm, and also because they didn’t know any better anyhow, just because nobody had taught what to do or say to them, so they would go about just doing whatever they had to do, after all that was the way of life in the farms that for centuries, or we should say for thousands of years, people had lived and accepted as being normal.

Even nowadays while I am writing this article, I hate the way of life that I had to live in the farm when I was young and I hate it so much, because it made me then a dull person, not only then but for most of my life, and perhaps I am still a dull person now; only because we usually were living isolated lives and we had to keep ourselves to ourselves.

Of my shortcomings, I became aware even more, when I had to leave my farming life behind, since I had to start a different way of life somewhere else. And since then, right through my entire life I have tried to catch up with the rest of the community, but it seems to me that I have never been able to catch up completely, because even today there are times when I say things in a way that is not so clear, and I wish I could have said it better.

So, this is the reason why I hate still that way of life in the farms; it is because such a way of life that we had to live in the farm could only breed dull people; and so I became dull in the end; but I was not alone, because all those youths which ended up like me working in the farm at a very young age had to become dull like me.

But this is not all that I could complain about; because, there were times when we went into town, while we were there we could feel that some of the town’s people would ridicule us for being what we were, and this would hurt us very much as it was not our fault for being what we were. But let us not worry about this very negative side of life that we were living then, because if we worry too much it could make things even worse for us; therefore let us try to turn this negative aspect of life that we have lived into a positive one if we can; because whatever we do there would also be a positive side to it; in this case perhaps the positive side would be that we have learned that most time we have to work hard to earn a living, but not only that we would also accept other things just the way they come to us, and from them, try to turn negative into positive wherever we can, that would be the only sensible thing to do in life, so let us see if we can do that.

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Turning negative into positive

Turning negative into positive is what I would like to start doing today.

Dear readers, as you have read in my life story above, life can sometimes be very hard indeed for every one of us, and I have had a large share of hard life myself, and one of the reasons was that I worked in our family farm when I was very young, which in the end it became one of my life great disadvantage experience; and for that reason I could cry my heart out forever for the consequences that it created, but I am not going to surrender and continue to cry my heart out forever about that; because I believe that we all have to try to overcome our inner pains soon or later, therefore from now on I am going to try to turn this negative event of my life into a positive one the best way I can, that is the only way to go about with these sort of things, when they happen to us.

Now just to make it clear what I have said above, let us look at it from a different point of view, as you can see dear readers, this life story of mine has many sides, one of which is what I had to do during my young life and it turned out that I had to work in our family farm; working in the farm was not the best way to live for a very young man as I have already said, because there were some future problems attached by working in the farms of those times; now, because I worked in the farm in my very young life, during my life I have felt disadvantaged for a long time, feeling disadvantaged is a negative thing, because it hurt for a very long time, and I have felt hurt even more because I was living in the farms without knowing the consequences that could and would follow me, so, even today my heart wants to cry out, but I am not going to let it happen in this negative way all the time, because I have made up my mind that I am going to fight back, and try to turn a negative experience into a positive something, I believe that this is the only way that makes sense and I am going to try it out anyhow, I know that what I am saying here may sound even ridiculous. Because if we try hard to do that, it might indeed look ridiculous, as you might see when you read our next article, but I am going to try it anyhow, as this is the only way that I can think of how to break away from my negative feelings these days.

Now, at this point of time this is where I would like to stop with this article, there will be more farm life stories later on, but now let me break away for the time being from the negative things of my life, because in my next article, I am going to make an effort and describe how I would break away from my old farm life and try to live a more normal life, therefore in a way I am rebelling against the old ways of living and I am going to try to turn negative into positive, as this could be the only way to deal with my life drawback; so in our next hub I will be talking about my effort of how to turn my life around and how to turn negative into positive, by talking about it and by writing about it, in my next article called, Hello my world, the ways we behave and every one of us has a story to tell. I know that what I am going to write may even sound ridiculous, but I have made up my mind and I am going to do it anyhow. See you soon in my next article, turning negative into positive.

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