Wisdom
There is wisdom to be found in hard work. The wisdom can be found by hard work in a family structure, a job, exercise, writing, reading, learning, mathematics, chess, building a stone wall, or gardening.
Anything we can find a progressive structure of continual improvement, which requires us to strive engenders wisdom.
In this small corner of the internet, we will focus on the wisdom i have found in gardening. I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me.
One Garden
In our lifetimes, we will only have the opportunity to tend approximately one garden for any significant length of time. Some people may own a home, then move on to a larger one. But for most of us, if we take up gardening, it is either later in life when we have more time or when we finally realize we might enjoy the hobby.
I have given a lot of thought to the question: what is a garden? Why do we garden? Some people like to plant vegetables, and it can be immensely satisfying to grow something yourself. Others aim to create something beautiful. I fall into the latter category, and I have found one sentence that best conveys my thoughts:
A garden is a painting we get to paint once.
In this way, a garden is a lot like life. We only get one. You can make mistakes, you can rearrange things, but the memory of what you did before is always there. You should approach it carefully, choosing the right plants and the right places for them. Find plants that complement one another and will fill the garden with color year-round.
Like life, choose your friends, your spouse, and your activities with care. They are the garden of your life. Design the layout of your life thoughtfully, because, like your garden beds, they will shape the picture you see when you look back.
Treat your life like a garden you only get to have once.
Taking Stock
I have said in the past that I don’t believe in "New Year’s resolutions." They are forced and timed in a way that sets most of us up for failure. But in the garden, there is a different, though similar, task that happens every year:
Taking stock.
You see, a garden doesn’t lie to you. It can’t. It doesn’t care about your feelings; it doesn’t care whether you think something worked or not. When a plant dies, the garden is telling you something didn’t work. When a plant thrives, the garden is telling you something went really well here.
There is no judgment about whether the failure was your fault, the weather’s fault, a random deer that ate the plant, or a fox that dug it up to make its new home. The fact remains that what you did either worked or didn’t. You can later assign a "liked it" or "didn’t like it." You can decide how you feel about the result of the year, but a garden will do you the great favor of letting you know how the year went.
So, sometime in the fall, I walk through the garden and make a list. What died? What is struggling? What thrived?
Why do we do this as gardeners? Because we need to know how to care for the garden and help it grow best. Should we spend all of our time leaning into the one thing that fails year after year? I won’t say no, but I will say we should be careful about it.
This is just like life. We should stop at certain points throughout our experience and ask ourselves: What works? What can we take stock of and be honest about? What took far more effort than we wanted, and what did we enjoy watching grow throughout the year and improve?
Take stock of your garden, and take stock of your life. Do it honestly, and the year that comes after will be even better than the one before.
Ride It Out
Gardening can teach us what is within and beyond our control. You can water during a drought, dig trenches in a deluge, and cut away the trunk of a broken, fallen tree. But you can’t demand the rain to start, the river to stop, or the tree to right itself again.
Sometimes, gardening tells us that the only thing we can do is our best to adapt to the situation and ride it out. The weather will change, for better or worse. Time will pass, trees will fall, and new trees will rise. We may see them begin, but we will not see them reach maturity. We are fleeting in comparison to nature, and sometimes all we can do is weather the proverbial storm.
This doesn’t excuse the gardener from working toward their goals—bending to nature’s inevitability while trying to channel it toward their own best ends. It is not surrender; it is understanding where we stand in comparison to nature’s will. We embrace the work, doing what we can to create a canvas of flowers for bees, for friends, for neighbors, and for ourselves. But even with the best of intentions and the greatest of striving, sometimes all there is to do is ride it out.
Finding Focus
Work is getting to me. I feel unappreciated and irrelevant. My friends don’t seem to particularly care about any of my thoughts, my hobbies, or my accomplishments. My dreams and aspirations feel like dead ends. I feel like hope is dying.
When there is no mechanism by which I can figure out the purpose of my existence, and it feels pointless, I garden.
My purpose becomes: weed these three square feet.
My purpose becomes: deadhead this bush.
My purpose becomes: trim this rose.
There is no other item on the immediate agenda, and its purpose is self-evident. I have time not to think about the things that are bothering me. I disconnect from the annoyance, hurt, or abandonment, and just do. Gardening, like many wonderful acts of manual labor and physical creativity, gives our minds the ability to not only know exactly what we are doing right now, but it also gives us the ability to say at the end of that time, “I did XYZ.”
Pick up gardening.
Try woodworking.
Draw, paint, or do chalk designs for the rain to wash away.
Learn how to lay stone walls.
Carve a dog into a bar of soap with a butter knife.
Find yourself a hands-on hobby that can take you away from things, and let you find that focus.
Gardening is mine.
What’s yours?
Take Your Time
There is something convenient about the pace of gardening. There is always work to do, but most of it is rarely urgent. Sure, there are harvest days and planting days where, give or take, the best results happen over the course of maybe a week, but nature can be surprisingly forgiving if you miss by a day here and there.
It is perhaps part of why gardening can be so relaxing, because a part of us understands, "What's the rush?"
It is a lesson for life. In this space, we frequently talk about the reality that life is filled with difficult decisions only we can make. We have no choice but to make them, and usually in the near future. I would never say to put off important things past their time, but when exactly is their time?
Is the deadline looming at work self-imposed? Do the five pounds you want to lose really need to come off this week, or can you give yourself some credit for the first three and an extra week to lose the rest? Is the book you are writing truly due on January 1st, or can you allow yourself until February to create a better story? Do you have to decide right now whether the kids will play soccer or baseball this year? Do you need to plan Friday's dinner on Tuesday, or can some of it just fall into place?
I don’t know your life and schedule, and for some people, knowing certain things are set in stone is useful and helpful. For others, it is not. Take a lesson from the garden, and always remember that you can slow down in your decisions. Take stock of where you are, then choose your future path with wisdom and confidence.
Sometimes it’s okay to take your time.
Find Your Metaphorical Garden
I want to introduce a new series on this site, which will be about your metaphorical garden and my literal one. Sort of.
I don’t mean I will be talking about gardening or the tips and tricks of gardening. I mean that I want to talk about the wisdom that can be derived from hard work at a long-term task. In my case, gardening.
For some people, it is learning to read well, write better, play a musical instrument, become a powerlifter, support a political cause, a religious cause, or a family member.
In Eastern parlance, it is the idea of Kung Fu. Kung Fu does not mean martial arts, and it is not a style of martial art. It literally means hard work. A person can have Kung Fu at cooking, gardening, exercise, intellectual pursuits, or life’s emotional needs. It means discipline, hard work, and long-term motivation.
When I picked up gardening, I didn’t know I would find wisdom in it; I thought I would find pretty flowers. But over the last five years of seriously trying to turn every inch of my lawn into a flower bed, I have found so many more things. What does it mean to work at a long-term project that theoretically has no ending? What does it mean to only tend to what you can take care of well? When should you ask for help? When is it important to do it yourself? How much time and effort should you dedicate to any one task? Why is there such extreme satisfaction in the act of weeding? When is it important to help a neighbor, and why does working on a complex project that others can see draw their attention?
There is nothing unique to the wisdom found in gardening, and I am not sure every metaphorical jewel will always work or hang together for other people, but I think there is something here that needs pointing out because so few of us work toward long-term goals today.
We are encouraged to spend time on thirty-second clips that show the results of other people’s lifelong pursuits or to pass the time with idle activities. I want to encourage you to find your own lifelong pursuit, one that you can never finish, and you can only asymptotically perfect. I want you to find your own wisdom and pass it on to your next generations and friends.
Let’s talk about getting dirty… because gardening is like life: You need to get your hands in the dirt to know anything.