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Tending the garden.
Jan. 19th, 2025 04:12 pmThis morning while doing chores in the kitchen I listened to this episode of the Cryptonaturalist and loved it so much I went and grabbed the transcript to post here.
It made me wish for my own garden space. We have no place to grow anything at this apartment complex, we aren't even allowed to have potted plants on the porches (or anything else - I always break this rule for 3-4 days with jack-o-lanterns for Halloween). I have no experience at all with growing things and have failed at most attempts aside from herbs, but a small raised bed for some herbs would be so lovely. I think it would help my psyche.
Anyway, this is very present-moment-awareness stuff, with a dash of growth mindset, e.g. process-oriented measurements of achievement (instead of measuring success by results, measure the effort put into the action - 'how hard did you strive' verses 'how far did you get'), and I think it's important.
This listen sure did make my few moments of lunch today extremely pleasurable and peaceful.
Episode 61: Tending the Garden
Written by Jarod K. Anderson
The human mind is a garden and, the way we tend it, day to day, is both the process and the product of the lives we live.
Welcome to The CryptoNaturalist.
Hello listener.
Each of our realities contains two landscapes, two forests.
One external and one internal.
The external is the living land beneath our feet. It’s the world we wander, the
place we encounter our universe through our senses.
The internal is the shape of our inner lives. It’s the home where we make meaning
and sus out identity in conversation with our senses, memories, and intuition.
Now, of course, these two worlds are not quite separate and distinct regions and
we often walk in the curious valley where they overlap, experiencing the
borderlands where the two woodlands meet and converge.
There, I like to imagine a bright clearing where we feel called to build.
This is where we cultivate the garden of our realities, our perceptions of our lives
and our own natures.
This is where we begin to understand the quality of soil and the characteristics of
green, growing things.
Yet, there’s a quirk of modernity that seems to whisper, “don’t just tend… overhaul.” Or perhaps, “don’t tend, achieve perfection.”
Now, ambition and gardening are not quite antithetical impulses.
Ambition often precedes effort.
Goals and the pursuit thereof are part of the richness of life.
Yet, I have found in my own life that something about the shape of many of the external pressures in modern society seem to transform goals from something that serves us into a scowling taskmaster who we can never quite satisfy.
In theory, goals lead to satisfaction. But, somehow, the version of a “goal oriented” life I internalized was less a path to satisfaction and more an endless rejection of it.
I suppose it’s worth asking, “is it really so bad to never be satisfied?”
Afterall, doesn’t that drive us on to greatness? Haven’t we heard phrases like “stay hungry” used in the service of finding success and purpose?
Well, humor me for a bit when I say, “no, it isn’t so great to never be satisfied.”
Consider, the rather obvious-sounding statement, “if we never allow ourselves to be satisfied, then we will never be satisfied.”
Okay. Makes sense. Does that sound like the shape of a life that’s enjoyable and
nourishing to live? Does it sound reasonable?
Being satisfied, like tending a garden, is a skill. If we never make room for that skill, if we stay firmly focused in a “what’s next” mindset, then how do we find pleasure in the challenges we’ve already faced?
When do we set aside time to take pleasure in the little kindnesses of life and the warmth of community and connection?
Well, we don’t… not when rejecting satisfaction becomes a virtue.
When ambition is our chief guide, there are no seasons of rest or enjoyment because there is always more to be done.
Again, ambition isn’t an evil, but ambition out of balance begins to miss the point, begins to be an exercise in futility.
And yet, much of my young education was solely focused on ambition, not on cultivating the skill of satisfaction, the skill of tending nourishing contentment.
I think of the language used by my teachers in school and adults in my young life. “Things will be different when you’re out in the ‘real world.’” Or, “just wait until you get a ‘real job’.”
The general message was that school, or perhaps more broadly ‘youth,’ was some sort of placeholder. Just a steppingstone on the way to becoming an actual, a full-fledged human being.
What does this sort of rhetoric, this sort of mindset do to us? What kind of lessons do we internalize when we hear this sort of talk for the first two decades of our lives?
Well, it places us firmly within a narrative in which our efforts have very little to do with the present and everything to do with eventual legitimacy, eventual authenticity. It’s a kind of perpetual “not yet” feeling.
Many of us spent our formative years focused on “becoming.”
Once in the working world, that legendary real world we heard so much about, do we shed this idea of perpetual becoming? Often, the answer is no.
Many shift to talk of the career path, of climbing the ladder.
That path, that ladder, are not destinations. They are yet another call to endless pursuit. Another call to delayed becoming.
Not tending a garden. Not participating in the present moment. Not cultivating satisfaction. Endless ambition. Endless focus on what’s next.
Now, of course, whatever our focus and intention, perpetual becoming is the nature of our world. Change touches all of us continuously, yet that central truth feels separate from the sort of frantic hunt for eventual legitimacy that seemed to mark much of my young life.
No, this obsession with the pursuit of some worthier version of ourselves and our lives is more akin to looking at our blooming garden and seeing only unrealized potential, seeing only an absence of some theoretical future accolade or more worthy token of achievement.
Goals. Ambition. An interest in cultivating intentional change.
These can be worthy aspects of life, but they are not the only worthy aspects.
Insomuch as success is purely subjective, if success feels forever out of reach, it may be worthwhile to begin questioning your own metrics for judging such things. Success is ours to define. The version of success that is forever just down the path is not a terribly useful or balanced conceptualization of the concept.
What’s the use of a tool we can never hold?
The illusion is that such a lofty, abstract idea of success will, eventually, arrive and solve everything.
But… it won’t.
The whole point of that version of success is that it doesn’t arrive.
Once upon a time, trained and shaped by cultural forces, I was focused on endless becoming and that just-out-of-reach model of success. Within that context, I have a vivid memory of reaching a monumental goal ahead of my projected schedule.
In short, I did it. Goal pursued. Goal achieved.
Go ahead and take a guess at how long I enjoyed that victory. Take a guess about
how long my satisfaction with that success lasted.
If you guessed “about five minutes,” you’d be correct.
That’s the thing. Some versions of success, akin to pursuing certain modes of wealth or fame or praise, have no natural endpoint. There’s no organic limiting factor built-in to such concepts. The pursuit doesn’t end until you decide it ends.
If our lives and minds are gardens, living things shaped through our choices, then at some point it is time to turn from sowing to tending and even harvesting. It’s the shift from seeking to having and enjoying.
Many of us are trained to respect seeking and sowing to the exclusion of all other aspects of gardening.
This can work… until it doesn’t.
Recently, I was speaking to a young CryptoNaturalist who was deeply focused on collecting accolades.
His goals were all about winning praise as a benchmark for success.
I counseled him against such goals and he seemed confused by my advice.
I told him, instead, to focus on process goals. Goals that are within his control to achieve.
See, If your goal is all about external validation, well, you’ve placed the lever of your success outside your own reach, outside your control. That is not a recipe for satisfaction. If, on the other hand, you focus on a process goal, then that idea of success is within your control, within your own power to grant to yourself.
No, you can’t control winning an award or earning x amount of money, but you can control journaling every day or applying yourself to learning a skill for thirty minutes each evening or submitting your writing for publication x times a year.
Identity and success are linked forms of subjective meaning.
We play a part in cultivating these concepts within our own inner landscapes.
Given that essential fact, it is vital that our intentionality in shaping these concepts is guided by a bit of kindness for ourselves.
In other words, goals and ambitions have merit, but so too does cultivating contentment and joy in the act of tending our gardens, of meeting ourselves where we are and imbuing that meeting with value.
A garden is not just a plot of land on which something better might be built.
We must all be careful that we do not get trapped within such a narrow, self-defeating mindset.
Until next time, we’re all strange animals. So, act like it.
It made me wish for my own garden space. We have no place to grow anything at this apartment complex, we aren't even allowed to have potted plants on the porches (or anything else - I always break this rule for 3-4 days with jack-o-lanterns for Halloween). I have no experience at all with growing things and have failed at most attempts aside from herbs, but a small raised bed for some herbs would be so lovely. I think it would help my psyche.
Anyway, this is very present-moment-awareness stuff, with a dash of growth mindset, e.g. process-oriented measurements of achievement (instead of measuring success by results, measure the effort put into the action - 'how hard did you strive' verses 'how far did you get'), and I think it's important.
This listen sure did make my few moments of lunch today extremely pleasurable and peaceful.
Episode 61: Tending the Garden
Written by Jarod K. Anderson
The human mind is a garden and, the way we tend it, day to day, is both the process and the product of the lives we live.
Welcome to The CryptoNaturalist.
Hello listener.
Each of our realities contains two landscapes, two forests.
One external and one internal.
The external is the living land beneath our feet. It’s the world we wander, the
place we encounter our universe through our senses.
The internal is the shape of our inner lives. It’s the home where we make meaning
and sus out identity in conversation with our senses, memories, and intuition.
Now, of course, these two worlds are not quite separate and distinct regions and
we often walk in the curious valley where they overlap, experiencing the
borderlands where the two woodlands meet and converge.
There, I like to imagine a bright clearing where we feel called to build.
This is where we cultivate the garden of our realities, our perceptions of our lives
and our own natures.
This is where we begin to understand the quality of soil and the characteristics of
green, growing things.
Yet, there’s a quirk of modernity that seems to whisper, “don’t just tend… overhaul.” Or perhaps, “don’t tend, achieve perfection.”
Now, ambition and gardening are not quite antithetical impulses.
Ambition often precedes effort.
Goals and the pursuit thereof are part of the richness of life.
Yet, I have found in my own life that something about the shape of many of the external pressures in modern society seem to transform goals from something that serves us into a scowling taskmaster who we can never quite satisfy.
In theory, goals lead to satisfaction. But, somehow, the version of a “goal oriented” life I internalized was less a path to satisfaction and more an endless rejection of it.
I suppose it’s worth asking, “is it really so bad to never be satisfied?”
Afterall, doesn’t that drive us on to greatness? Haven’t we heard phrases like “stay hungry” used in the service of finding success and purpose?
Well, humor me for a bit when I say, “no, it isn’t so great to never be satisfied.”
Consider, the rather obvious-sounding statement, “if we never allow ourselves to be satisfied, then we will never be satisfied.”
Okay. Makes sense. Does that sound like the shape of a life that’s enjoyable and
nourishing to live? Does it sound reasonable?
Being satisfied, like tending a garden, is a skill. If we never make room for that skill, if we stay firmly focused in a “what’s next” mindset, then how do we find pleasure in the challenges we’ve already faced?
When do we set aside time to take pleasure in the little kindnesses of life and the warmth of community and connection?
Well, we don’t… not when rejecting satisfaction becomes a virtue.
When ambition is our chief guide, there are no seasons of rest or enjoyment because there is always more to be done.
Again, ambition isn’t an evil, but ambition out of balance begins to miss the point, begins to be an exercise in futility.
And yet, much of my young education was solely focused on ambition, not on cultivating the skill of satisfaction, the skill of tending nourishing contentment.
I think of the language used by my teachers in school and adults in my young life. “Things will be different when you’re out in the ‘real world.’” Or, “just wait until you get a ‘real job’.”
The general message was that school, or perhaps more broadly ‘youth,’ was some sort of placeholder. Just a steppingstone on the way to becoming an actual, a full-fledged human being.
What does this sort of rhetoric, this sort of mindset do to us? What kind of lessons do we internalize when we hear this sort of talk for the first two decades of our lives?
Well, it places us firmly within a narrative in which our efforts have very little to do with the present and everything to do with eventual legitimacy, eventual authenticity. It’s a kind of perpetual “not yet” feeling.
Many of us spent our formative years focused on “becoming.”
Once in the working world, that legendary real world we heard so much about, do we shed this idea of perpetual becoming? Often, the answer is no.
Many shift to talk of the career path, of climbing the ladder.
That path, that ladder, are not destinations. They are yet another call to endless pursuit. Another call to delayed becoming.
Not tending a garden. Not participating in the present moment. Not cultivating satisfaction. Endless ambition. Endless focus on what’s next.
Now, of course, whatever our focus and intention, perpetual becoming is the nature of our world. Change touches all of us continuously, yet that central truth feels separate from the sort of frantic hunt for eventual legitimacy that seemed to mark much of my young life.
No, this obsession with the pursuit of some worthier version of ourselves and our lives is more akin to looking at our blooming garden and seeing only unrealized potential, seeing only an absence of some theoretical future accolade or more worthy token of achievement.
Goals. Ambition. An interest in cultivating intentional change.
These can be worthy aspects of life, but they are not the only worthy aspects.
Insomuch as success is purely subjective, if success feels forever out of reach, it may be worthwhile to begin questioning your own metrics for judging such things. Success is ours to define. The version of success that is forever just down the path is not a terribly useful or balanced conceptualization of the concept.
What’s the use of a tool we can never hold?
The illusion is that such a lofty, abstract idea of success will, eventually, arrive and solve everything.
But… it won’t.
The whole point of that version of success is that it doesn’t arrive.
Once upon a time, trained and shaped by cultural forces, I was focused on endless becoming and that just-out-of-reach model of success. Within that context, I have a vivid memory of reaching a monumental goal ahead of my projected schedule.
In short, I did it. Goal pursued. Goal achieved.
Go ahead and take a guess at how long I enjoyed that victory. Take a guess about
how long my satisfaction with that success lasted.
If you guessed “about five minutes,” you’d be correct.
That’s the thing. Some versions of success, akin to pursuing certain modes of wealth or fame or praise, have no natural endpoint. There’s no organic limiting factor built-in to such concepts. The pursuit doesn’t end until you decide it ends.
If our lives and minds are gardens, living things shaped through our choices, then at some point it is time to turn from sowing to tending and even harvesting. It’s the shift from seeking to having and enjoying.
Many of us are trained to respect seeking and sowing to the exclusion of all other aspects of gardening.
This can work… until it doesn’t.
Recently, I was speaking to a young CryptoNaturalist who was deeply focused on collecting accolades.
His goals were all about winning praise as a benchmark for success.
I counseled him against such goals and he seemed confused by my advice.
I told him, instead, to focus on process goals. Goals that are within his control to achieve.
See, If your goal is all about external validation, well, you’ve placed the lever of your success outside your own reach, outside your control. That is not a recipe for satisfaction. If, on the other hand, you focus on a process goal, then that idea of success is within your control, within your own power to grant to yourself.
No, you can’t control winning an award or earning x amount of money, but you can control journaling every day or applying yourself to learning a skill for thirty minutes each evening or submitting your writing for publication x times a year.
Identity and success are linked forms of subjective meaning.
We play a part in cultivating these concepts within our own inner landscapes.
Given that essential fact, it is vital that our intentionality in shaping these concepts is guided by a bit of kindness for ourselves.
In other words, goals and ambitions have merit, but so too does cultivating contentment and joy in the act of tending our gardens, of meeting ourselves where we are and imbuing that meeting with value.
A garden is not just a plot of land on which something better might be built.
We must all be careful that we do not get trapped within such a narrow, self-defeating mindset.
Until next time, we’re all strange animals. So, act like it.
