To Grow a Garden
“The best time to plant a seed was yesterday. The next best time is right now”.
To grow a garden is to participate (or live). We are all growing gardens each moment that passes. Just by being, we are all contributing to the growth of a global garden. Which flowers bloom, and which wilt is greatly determined by where we place our resources and focus. Some can’t help but lament at how their neighbour’s garden is so much more luscious and vibrant than their own. Some put more focus on the few and tiny weeds that threaten their garden rather than enjoying the flowers in bloom. While some devote their lives to help others tend to their garden. Let’s tend to and enjoy our gardens.
What is it to be a gardener? Surely, it’s more than just having a love for playing in the dirt. Being a gardener is to be someone who believes in doing what’s right today, for a better tomorrow. To tend to the weeds in the garden today, is to have a more fruitful harvest tomorrow. Luckily for us, so much of the real work happens behind the scenes, without much involvement on our part. Our real job as gardeners, is to create a space that is optimal for growth, to allow the natural processes of life to take place, and to pay attention.
I’m sorry, I’m a sucker for a good metaphor. Although one may take away that I’m a veteran of gardening given the example, it may come as a surprise that I am very new to it. I think a lot of us are new, or entirely unintroduced, to the idea of gardening and how perfectly the principles translate to how to live a life worth living. This seems to be the case with many activities that we participate in; those metaphorical, “repeating patterns” that we see translate to life comes from a certain level of nuance. With enough experience in a given activity, one almost always sees the entire universe within it.
I’ve chosen the garden metaphor because it carries within it an attractive ideal: intentionality. One rarely grows a (real) garden by accident. But as each moment ticks by, we are contributing in some way or another to our, and therefore everyone else’s, garden. For each moment spent focusing on what our garden lacks, and what others have, we are spending time in a way that is going to lead to further suffering (and our garden is still the same at the end of it). Before long, this way of viewing the world can become the default state, and we lose sight of all that we DO have. So why is it that it is so much easier to let our lives run amuck with little conscious direction being taken, if at all? I think at the base of it stands ignorance, willful or otherwise; ignorance of our power to resource our own materials, to change and curate our experience, and just how strongly of an impact we can have on our future selves and others. Some people can get so consumed with their own weeds that the thought of changing their experience or the idea of being of service to others seems completely useless. One can’t pour from an empty cup. One can’t water their neighbour’s plants if their own weeds keep drinking it all up!
“We can go a long time without exactly figuring out what the weeds in our lives are”
Therefore, well placed intentionality can be such a potent contributor to a more fruitful harvest. If we can first, remove the weeds that are consuming so much of our energy, like procrastination, workaholism, poorly/not defined goals, obsession, addiction, sleeping too much/too little or whatever it may be (you probably know what it is), we are left with more energy to spend on the things that matter. With that newly restored energy, we can set out to develop ourselves in ways that we’ve wanted to, but always lacked the motivation or desire to do so. And always remember that even a 1-degree change to your trajectory will land you somewhere completely different.
I think we all know how to have and set intentions, but how about the following through side of things? A great way to invite some intention into your life is to get yourself a journal. Write down some goals you would like to achieve, and how you will achieve them. It’s important to set goals, but it’s even more important to set up your routine, or your system that will allow you to complete those goals. By focusing on the behaviours that you associate with a given skill, for example, learning to handstand, you quite literally become a person who is learning to handstand, as opposed to someone who would like to know how to handstand one day. It may seem like a subtle difference, but while one focuses on some future version of yourself, the other focuses on becoming that person today. Want to become a writer? Write today. Want to become an assertive person? Be assertive today. Invite aspects of what it’s like to BE a writer or BE an assertive person. By setting an intention and allowing a change in your daily routine, you are well on your way to becoming the person you’ve always wanted and deserve to be.
These additions and subtractions we can make to our behavioural rolodex will change the way our brain is organized. By cutting off behaviours that we know to be damaging to some ultimate future version of ourselves, and by inviting in more conducive behaviours, we are increasing our ability to do more of that in the future. We are making use of the plastic nature of the brain and putting it to real use. I think that can be quite a profound realization to have; to realize that you are crafting your world each moment based on the behaviours and thoughts you engage with, you quickly realize just how powerful a force you are in your own life and in others.
So start today!
- Our Blue Sky Minds
