Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Clearing Weeds from Your Garden. And Your Life.

This Saturday morning was spent with my knees in dirt and my back reminding me that I’m not as young as I used to be.

I was participating in a pastime that we all must endure — extracting weeds from the flowerbed, lawn, and garden. It seems to be a ritual that must be repeated about every two weeks. Or about every third day if it rains a lot.

Although we have just about every weed extracting tool known to man, I’ve discovered the tools that seem to work best are my two hands — so I use those. So, as I’m pulling and digging and cursing the occasional ant that decides to seek revenge, I think.

Now my normal plan of attack on the unruly weeds is to start at one end and go to the other. That’s probably how most weeds meet their untimely demise. Start at one end of the flowerbed and keep going until they’re all out. Seems logical.

But not always. Not when you have kids. And soccer games. And cheerleading practice. And a cook-out for which you need to go to the grocery store. And… I know that sometimes, my weed yanking gets derailed — other emergencies take priority — like a SpongeBob marathon with the kids.

So rather than start with the first weed and end with the last, I took a few steps back and looked at the flowerbed as a whole. Immediately, I saw the five or six weeds that were huge and complete eyesores. And I only pulled those.

Then I saw the next bunch of weeds that would become menacing monsters in about a week. Gone. Then the next, and the next. Finally (about the same time it was time for Daddy to hunt for a stray shin guard) the only weeds left were the small clovers.

Though I hate the clovers, I took a couple of steps back again. And I realized that you couldn’t even see the clovers from the sidewalk. Okay, so I ended up pulling them too, but I guess I didn’t really have to.

My weedy point is that although we should all know by now to start with the “first things first”, we don’t always follow through. As humans, we tend to work on what is easiest, what makes us happy, or what will generate results the quickest.

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