Conscious Career – Day 27
Conscious Career Day 27
Conscious Living Career Challenge – Too Wet To Plow
Have you heard the old American idiom, “Can’t dance and it’s too wet to plow”?
It means “might as well” as in… A co-worker says to you: “Some of us are getting together for drinks after work tonight. Do you want to come?” Since you don’t have anything else to do tonight, you reply; “Might as well. Can’t dance and it’s too wet to plow.”
The “can’t dance” part can have several meanings. Maybe you can’t dance because you lack the capacity, or maybe you can’t dance because you don’t have a partner or a place to do it. Nevertheless, the second part of the statement, “too wet to plow” certainly makes sense when you put it into context.
It comes out of the agrarian age, when there was a high probability that you would have lived on a farm. It would have been your home and your livelihood. If the field was too wet to plow, you found something else to do to help the farm thrive. You’d repair fences, work in the barn, make repairs around the house, go into town for supplies, or whatever. The point is that there’s always something else to do when it’s too wet to plow.
Though the majority of Americans no longer live an agrarian lifestyle, the idiom, “too wet to plow” is still part of our language, and it still means “might as well do something else.”
When we look at it from a modern perspective, it stands in as a perfect metaphor for the concepts Wallace D. Wattles discusses in chapter, “Getting Into The Right Business,” from his book, The Science of Getting Rich. Wattles says that if you can’t get into your right business or vocation at this time, do what you can where you are currently in order to move where you want to be. In other words, what can you do when it’s too wet to plow?
