The other day I was walking between buildings at my day job, still musing on the ideas of spaciousness and making room for the things we want to grow, and the image of a weed-choked garden sprang to mind.
The Internet isn’t bad per se; it’s just full of weeds. I’m fond of quite a few plants that are classified as weeds. Most of them mean “summer” to me, or recall rambles through the Pennsylvanian scrub woodlands that were my refuge in childhood. But you wouldn’t want a landscape composed of nothing but milkweed and Queen Anne’s Lace, probably, and if I want to make space in my life for things to grow, I need to clear away some weeds, or at the very least stop watering them.
So far, my experiment with a more attentive 2019 is going well. I’m not going to give a project status report here — that’s for the end of the month — but reframing things as “what do I want to allow into this time?” instead of “how many things do I have to do?” has led me feel a bit more relaxed than has sometimes been my habit. The days are a little more open, but things are still getting done. I’m getting a little better about checking in with myself when I reach for my phone — am I actually doing a purposeful thing, or just filling up time? Is there something else I should be attending to? What am I distracting myself from?
They say that you get what you plant.
R Jean Stevenson 