The stillness of gardening 👨‍🌾

The art of gardening has many philosophical things in them, and really this goes for life as a whole. I want to talk about the stillness of gardening and how it can help you become a better person. You can build a lot of great skills with a garden. I want to focus on stillness today.

Wait and watch ⌚

If you have ever had a garden, you know that there is only so much that you can do. You can water your flowers, you can prune your tomatoes, and harvest the fruit. But the rest is really up to the weather and the plant. That’s why I don’t think it’s hard to have a garden. The plants do all the work. If you have a garden, you give up control of what is going to happen. You don’t know if it’s going to rain tomorrow or if the sun is going to shine. It’s not in your control. So you just have to wait and watch.

This simple philosophy, to wait and watch, can be applied to your day-to-day life as well. You don’t know if there will be a lot of traffic on your way to work tomorrow. You don’t know what the weather will be like tomorrow, you don’t even know if you are going to leave tomorrow. These are all think we don’t control. So give up that imagined sense of control and focus on what you can control. Like watering your flowers.

Accept what happens - Amor Fati 🤷‍♂️

The stoics talk a lot about amor fati, which translates directly to the love of one’s fate. It implies that whatever happens to you, how bad the circumstances may be, you will always make the best of it and don’t get bitter about it. Seneca said Misfortune is virtue's opportunity. The same goes for a fire in the woods. It may seem terrible to hear something like that, but this burns the old wood and the ash nurtures new plant growth.

The same can be seen in our garden. Let’s say one of your beloved tomatoes dies. You don’t know why it happened, you took care of it so well, this is unfair, why you? But this is the path to bitterness. Remember amor fati. Think about what you can learn from this. And what advantage do you get from one plant less? The roots of the plants now don’t compete with the others about minerals, they nurture the other plants with minerals. Now there is more room for the other plants to grow into even bigger and stronger plants.

Don’t fight nature 🐞

This is something that happened to me and my mother last summer. We planted some raspberries in the spring, and they have grown into huge bushes. We had more raspberries than we could eat in 2 lives. And with that, some branches lay on the ground and bugs could feed on them. So I wanted to sting them up, so we could eat the berries. But my mom said no, don’t do that. I asked her why. And she told me that our garden is a cycle. We get to eat the berries, but the bugs and birds that feed on this bush also live in this garden. We don’t own it. And this is just amazing. We as humans always think of ourselves as some higher power. Sure, our brains may be more advanced, but we are just another organism that lives on this planet. And we need to participate in this circulation. We depend on it. So it is foolish for us to want to take all the berries for ourselves.

Conclusion 📕

A garden can teach us a lot about ourselves and ourselves. I think everybody should try to raise some plants. Don’t look for excuses why you are not able to. Just try it, a green thumb as we in Germany say is just talent and not skill. And skill always beats talent. And even if you really can’t find a way to raise some plants, get into nature. Go for a walk, or drive to a forest. Get in touch with nature again.

If you enjoyed what you just read, please read some of my other posts as well. And if you want advice like this but in a shorter, more compact form, you can subscribe to my weekly email newsletter. Every Thursday, I will send you some advice to help you with your everyday trouble. Click here to sign up.

See you next time:)