Long-Distance Gardening

Person: What was the public reaction to elections in Brazil, Dui?
Dui: I don't know.

I'm not on social media, I don't read or see the news, I don't text or use Whatsapp, and I don't use the Internet.

Why would I choose that?

I'm careful about tending to my mind like a mind gardener tending to a garden of thoughts. Like the plants in a garden, our thoughts change with time, strengthened and weakened by how we nurture them and by the other plants beside them.

Unlike a garden, our mind won't allow us to pull the weeds. Once a weed is growing, it's growing. Like a gardener separated from their field by a glass wall, we can only tend to it by throwing seeds over the wall and watching them bloom or die.

Tending to our mind's garden is like long-distance gardening.

The genie in a bottle

We all carry a genie, our own genius, in the lamps and bottles of our minds. I don't mean genius in the $500k MacArthur Fellowship genius grant way, but in the personality and thoughts and feelings we carry with us way.

Unlike in Aladdin, no amount of rubbing and scratching our heads will release that genius. It's forever condemned, chained inside our minds, bouncing against the walls with what seems like its own volition.

Do you feel it sometimes, the genius bouncing around inside your head? Hitting against the inside walls of your skull?

Listen to your genie.

What does it say?

100,000 words diet

That's what we feed our garden daily: 100,000 words.

Like the calories in a diet, every day we consume about 100,000 words with our minds.

Like calories in a diet, the words you consume make a big difference in what type of garden you have and what your genius says.

100,000 words is a book length's worth of information. We ingest the equivalent of a book per day.

While that quantity of daily words is equivalent to that of a book, the quality of those words is nowhere close.

Given the choice, we choose to ingest junk words.

We throw junk in our gardens.

1-way and 2-way doors

There's a decision-making criteria in business called 1-way vs 2-way doors: if a decision can be easily undone, a 2-way door, do it quickly. If it's hard to undo, a 1-way door, evaluate it carefully.

What to feed our minds is a 1-way door type of decision.

Due to the glass wall separating us from our garden, we can't come in to clean it up. We can't pull the weeds or remove the junk.

The only thing we can do to keep our garden free of junk is to prevent the junk from getting there in the first place.

We do that by choosing not to throw junk in our gardens.

Because nobody else is throwing junk in our gardens.

We are.

Decide to tend to your garden

You have a garden. That's not your decision to make. We were all granted one, and you'll have it with you until your last day.

You can, though, decide to care for your garden. To create a thriving garden full of healthy plants and the most beautiful flowers.

You're not being flooded by the news. You're not surrounded by social media negativity. You're not being impacted by constant stimulation and novelty.

You're pursuing it.

You're not the victim. You're the agent.

Nobody's throwing junk in your garden. Nobody can. The choice of what goes in your garden is a choice that only you can make.

Decide to take back your gardening tools from others' hands.

Decide to practice your own long-distance gardening.