Picture a garden. The dirt is poor and coarse, the sort of stuff that crunches dryly under your foot. There are weeds everywhere, desperately clinging to life as they poke through cracked pavers and scattered stones. There are no borders or pots, just dirt, pavers, and gravel everywhere with things planted in haphazard ways. Now I want you to put a flower in this garden. Dig a little hole, put a green sapling in it, and gently pat the soil back down. Then put a little water on it and then leave it be.
What happens to that flower? Play it out in your mind for a moment. In that garden, under those conditions, what happens to that little sapling?
Now we’re going to flip that image. Picture a new garden. This garden is lush and green. The soil is soft and rich with life. The weeds have been plucked, the pavers are well maintained, and it might not always look like it, but every plant has it’s place. Now, I want you to take another flower. You take dig a little hole in a free spot and put a little green sapling in it. Gently pat that soil back down, put a little water on it, then leave it be.
What happens to that flower? How do you think it compares to the other sapling you planted? What do they look like after a few months, a few years?
Now, what you need to realise is that flower is you. Just as a flower withers or flourishes depending on it’s environment, so do you.
Take a moment to look at your life. Look at your own environment. Is it good? What’s the first thing that came to mind?
Was it your bedroom? Your house? Was it your friends? Your family? What about your job? Or your partner?
All of these things are part of your physical and social environment; these are the garden that you’re planted in and they’re determining your growth. Your living arrangement, your relationships, and your job all influence the quality of your life. If you have poor input, you’ll only ever get poor output. As they say: “garbage in, garbage out”.
So, what can we do to improve this garden of yours?
Housing
Your living arrangement is pretty core to your day-to-day life. Consider this the soil that you’re planted in. If you’re starting and ending each day in a pile of your own filth, you’re not giving yourself the respect you deserve. As an old Canadian Psychologist once said, “your room is an externalisation of your mind”. Messy room, messy mind. Messy mind, messy room. Sometimes getting your head in order is a real battle, but you know what’s far easier? Picking your dirty clothes off the floor and taking them to the laundry, making your bed, or organising your desk a bit.
If you’ve never done this, it might sound too easy to be true, but give it a try. To those of you that have cleaned your room before, or ever been in a clean room, you have no excuse; you know how much better it feels than being in a dirty room.
I’m not suggesting you move heaven and earth here. If your room is unclean you don’t need to make it look like a display home straight away. You do need to take some sort of step though. You have to start somewhere. Even if it’s small, like clearing the clutter from your desk; putting a few things back in their place. Build a small stronghold and work outwards from there. Protect that space, keep it clean, and grow it with time. Start with the desk, move to other furniture, conquer the bed, then launch a successful campaign against the floor. A clean, orderly, bedroom is your stronghold against the chaos of life.
Friends
Friends are tricky, really tricky. You may have heard the adage that you are your three closest friends before. If you haven’t, it means what it says on the tin. Take a look at the three closet friends that you have. You are probably an amalgamation of them. Questioning how much of you is them and how much of them is you is too complicated for now. A real ‘chicken and egg’ line of questioning. What is important is that it’s well recognised that your social circle is reflective of you. And you are just as reflective of it.
Let me tell you a personal story to drive this home. For many years, I had a group of very close friends. We had been a tight-knit group through high school and, after we graduated, we stayed that way. Our external lives changed, often drastically, but our social lives stayed very similar to when we were high schoolers. The same patterns, petty grievances, and troubles all played out day after day.
I had a picture of who I wanted to be and the life I wanted to live. When I looked at the people around me, I didn’t see that reflected. There was always talk; dudes blustering about the things they were doing, with very little action. I was the same – I’m throwing stones from a glass house here. I blustered and talked the talk just as much, if not even more, than anyone else. I would talk about who I wanted to be and the things I wanted to do, but I stayed stuck in the tar that group had created.
At some point, something had to give. On the one hand, I wanted to be a certain type of person; on the other, I just simply wasn’t being that. I could have stayed in that group and accepted the glacial pace that things moved, or I could strike out and become who I wanted to be. So, I made one of the hardest decisions I could have.
In future, I will make a guide to finding new friends when you leave everything behind, because that’s a massive process in of itself. But for now, just know its something that needs to be done if you want to grow.
I haven’t mentioned family or relationships yet, and I’ll leave an in-depth covering for another time, but know that the same principles from friendships apply. Of course, family relationships and dating can be more complicated to deal with, but the principles do apply. You need to cut the dead weight if you want to grow.
Job
So, the last area to cover for now is your job. I hope you’re working or doing something productive with your time. If not, then that’s a different conversation we’ll need to have, but I’ll save it for then.
If you’re working full-time or anything close, you’re spending a significant portion of your time at your workplace. It’s important to remember that you’re being shaped by the environment you’re in. If you know me, you know I’ve worked in some pretty varied environments, but I’ll tell you about one of the most boring.
I spent roughly six months of my life doing data entry for a large hospital. It paid fantastically well for what it was, and some of the team had to have been the funniest people I’ve had the pleasure of being trapped in a room with. Those were the positives. The negatives were that I worked in a small room with no windows, no real ventilation, and staring at a screen for seven and half hours a day. I did the same task, practically all day, every day, with no real variation. Being someone who is very driven, I pushed myself to crush any metrics put in front of me. The issue was that the work was endless. No matter how many documents I processed in a day, there would be more the next day. It was a true Sisyphean task. It wore on my mind and my body. I felt like my eyes degraded and, when I got them tested, I found out I wasn’t imagining it. The mental effects were almost worst. I was crushed by the monotony of the work and the dead-end nature of working in that setting.
I found myself becoming quieter and more withdrawn. I had less energy for my sports and that made me depressed. My eye condition also made me depressed. Waking up when it was dark, not seeing the sun, or even outside, until I was heading home – you guessed it, also made me depressed. The job was molding me into a person I didn’t want to be. It was an easy job and it paid very well, but that only served to lull me into half-conscious state. I saw the effect it had on the people around me and I didn’t want that for myself. Luckily, I had an out. Though, we’re not always so lucky and it can be hard to give up the money, security, or comfortablity with the familiar – even when it’s hurting us.
I won’t tell you to quit your job. That’s just impulsive and reckless. You do however, need to take an honest look at your job. Look at what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, and where you’re doing it. These things have a big impact on your life and you need to make sure it’s the kind of impact you want.
Bringing it in to Land
So, what’s on your mind after hearing all of that?
It’s a lot to think about, for sure. It’s important to think about though. It’s easy to stumble through life; the years will pass you by as you put one foot in front of the other. It’s easy to live through the drudgery, but it’s not as easy to live with the consequences. If you want to improve the quality of your life, there’s no better place to start than with looking at your garden, your environment.
The choice is always up to you, but I have a feeling there’s at least a small part of you that can see the impact this idea could have on your life.
So, what are you going to do with it?