Weeding my Garden
By: Shaun Moshasha
Tags: Perspective, Habit Building, Happiness, Productivity, Growth

Those who have been around me for the past couple months have probably heard me say that I’ve been busy weeding my garden. You might have understood me intuitively, or you might not have known what the hell I was talking about, but either way it is a very useful metaphor for me and perhaps for you too.

We all have to pay bills, make sure we have insurance, go to the doctors and get regular checkups, brush our teeth every morning, and the list goes on. We must do all of these things before we can get to the more interesting goals of uncovering and pursuing our purpose in life. These are the basic minimums of the structures we have established in order for us to be functioning human beings in this current time and place in society. You are free to agree or disagree with any of the above mundane tasks, and place them in your order of priority of how you want to follow them, but they are present none-the-less and are artifacts of the constructs of society that we have collectively agreed upon.

Let’s go back to the garden metaphor. I call these types of mundane tasks the weeds.

If you want to be a good gardener and have a beautiful garden that will produce beautiful and nutritional food to feed you your entire life, you must tend to your garden. First and foremost, you must clear the naturally grown land in order to build a fresh garden bed. Now, this naturally grown land might be super easy to clear, the soil might already be loose and fertile, and the ground itself might already be ideal for developing a garden. Other times, the land is extremely difficult to clear. It might be riddled with roots and vines and thorns and rocks. You might be digging into clay. Clearing the land then becomes a brutal task.

The initial step of clearing the land is your transition from a growing person to an autonomous person. When you are growing, your landscape is created by the combination and interplay of the landscapes around you that have formed you: Your parents and family, teachers, and friends. You don’t quite have the concept of developing your own garden yet because you are still thriving off the fruits of others in order for your landscape to emerge in the first place. Through your transition to becoming an autonomous person, you start to discover who you are in the context of the greater landscape and begin to develop who you want to be. This is the start of your becoming a gardener.

By recognizing your growing autonomy and your individual passions, you become excited as your eyes open to the world of possibility. You start to recognize how others have shaped their own gardens and how you can begin to shape yours. So you take the seeds of fruit trees from every garden that piques your interest and plant them in rapid succession into your own garden.

Beautiful! Now you have the saplings from 100 different trees all growing in your garden! You will be brilliant and successful and charming and suave and kind and skilled! At this point, many things can happen:

- Some trees will grow faster than others.

- Some trees will die off randomly.

- Some trees can die off in clusters.

- Some trees will grow better in clusters.

What is going on? Using our god-given gifts of curiosity, intuition, and logic, we can begin to understand what it takes to nurture a healthy garden.

First, we have only a limited amount of space in our garden. If we plant too many trees, they will begin to starve each other out. This is our time. We can only focus on so many activities before each activity is negatively impacted due to spreading our nutrients too far out. This might have been fine for the saplings, but as the trees grow they each need an increasing amount of nutrients and devotion in order to thrive.

Second, we will tend to have favorite trees and gravitate towards them, encouraging them to grow with the majority of our love and attention. Naturally, these trees will grow faster and stronger while the other trees begin to regress due to neglect.

Third, some trees are symbiotic and will enhance others growth in their own cluster. It takes less work overall to grow these trees because they all support each other in an ecosystem.

Fourth, some trees might have been the unfortunate victim of circumstance, such as being struck by lightning or decimated by cicadas. Sometimes you can’t do anything about these things, but that is why it is important to plant and tend to a couple strong trees instead of focusing on just one.

Fifth, which probably should be first, some trees just won’t grow in your particular landscape or climate. You might love avocados, but if your landscape is on top of a mountain than you might want to choose another fruit. Of course, if you really love avocados then you can grow a goddamn avocado tree on top of a mountain- we have the technology- but you might have to build a greenhouse. Bottom line, you can choose fruit that are not native to your landscape, but it will certainly take you far more time and resources to nurture it successfully.

Lessons for planning your garden:

- Choose fruit that are native to your landscape if possible to form strong roots and a strong fruiting body that you can rely upon. Once those are established it becomes much easier to dabble in the exotic varieties that can become your passion rather than your sustenance.

- Choose fruit that complement each other so you have the synergistic effect. You will save energy in the long-run and your fruit will be much more resilient to any external or internal shocks.

- Recognize that you cannot tend to all the trees. You have to make decisions as each of the trees grows and takes on it’s own life, which you will focus on and which will take a back seat. This is a process of semi-constant monitoring and maintenance, best done at regular prescribed intervals. If you monitor and maintain too much, you are at risk of mistaking long-term health and viability for short term fluctuations.

Ok, now you have the perfect plan for your garden. You have your initial fruit trees, you have a good routine set up, now it’s time to clear your land and plant your first fruit! (College)

Like I said above, depending on where in this world you happened to start your journey, your landscape might be already ripe for gardening, or it might be treacherous. Regardless, start clearing your land. Start by removing the top layers- any trees, vines, brush, rocks that have been part of your landscape since you can remember. Now is your opportunity to choose who you want to be. “I have been groomed to be a doctor since I can remember, but I want to be a painter!” Perhaps there are a couple rocks or trees that are so massive that you don’t want to put in the energy to move them, or perhaps you like the aesthetic value and appreciate them where they are. Either way, each of your decisions will shape your landscape and ultimately how your fruit trees grow.

Next, begin turning up the dirt so you can optimize the soil for growing conditions. Watch out though, as soon as you begin digging into the ground, you will likely run into many roots and rocks that you did not know were there. Cutting those roots might hurt a bit, but that is okay because you need to loosen the soil in order to get the best growth. Open your mind, allow yourself to be vulnerable, and allow yourself to challenge your own belief structures. This tilling of the dirt is a tough process and tends to correlate in time with what has become known as our “Quarter-Life Crisis.”

Now, you are ready to plant your fruit! Have fun, explore and experiment. While there are best practices, planting your garden is an entirely individual act that you should enjoy. You will learn through experience which varieties are the most bountiful, which go well together, and which you have a particular taste for. You will likely kill many of your plants as you experiment, but this is okay as long as you have a couple trees you are focused on bringing to fruition. Sometimes we get too excited in the beginning and don’t take enough time to till our gardens. Something will likely grow because life thrives, but you won’t have an optimal fruit output and will have to put in a lot more work down the line to improve your productivity. Hopefully, throughout the term of your life, you will develop a couple strong, fruit bearing trees, you have a couple thriving exotics, you are experimenting with hybrids, and you are spreading your seed far and wide. This is the most simple formula for a happy and productive life.