A Small Contemplation
Life interferes with not just the gardening, but blogging, and hobbies and whole lots of other things .
Even though those things are part of life.
So, what is really meant when stating that these things interfere with life? Life is a very complex thing… it has its basic existence requirements: we have to eat, sleep, and other things that wax and wane during the course of our days, but more to the point – what we called “Life” becomes an accumulation of our decisions.
We choose and are in the process of choosing what is important and mix that with what is necessary, we add layers of our ideas of duty and obligation, then weave in our desires and pleasures.
Pretty soon we have a very substantial and tangible thing we call “Life”.
Inside this matter of the mix being reality for all of us are the different sorts of people who live their lives along with us, and we all know that some are much more selfish or selfless than others.
Those who delay or displace their own dreams, through choice or training in selflessness, sometimes find their time and energies simply eaten up by the more selfish beings. We see this all the time in human practice and history and often in nature.
We are told how ephemeral life is: “our lives are but a vapor, as the grass of the field”. Fast fading, soon withered in the vast expanse of time and season. “The grass withers and the flower fades”.
Perhaps the onset of age makes the sharpness of the need for choice, and protection of the priorities one has, to be more obvious. My garden thrived when it was the one endeavor that my pre-eminent choices of homeschooling and being a SAHM coexisted harmoniously together with its needs in my life. Now, my life choices take me far from my garden, or compete with time in it. Now, life interferes with gardening because I choose to spend time with children and grandchildren during important garden seasons. My energies are spent inside the house more than outside of it.
Seasons teach us the importance of priorities, of given tasks appropriate for the change of the season and its own characteristics.
At each juncture of life we find a different set of things we must curtail and say “no” to, things to which we must answer “I can’t”, as well as new things to which we answer “I will”.
Time shuffles us, it may change our dreams, it certainly requires our attention.
The season has shifted and I can no longer make excuses, but look at how I choose to live life as an accumulation of what is most important.
I will always love my garden, and I no longer mourn the passing of what it once was. It once was more glorious to others eyes, and I am thinking that now its glories must entail what it may give in glorious moments simply to my own eye.
My Autumn’s, Late Autumn’s, Garden.
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© 2012 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal by Ilona E. An excellent blog.
