13. Make the Best Of It
Life Lessons of a Backyard Gardener
NOTE: This is Chapter 13 of my online book. Enjoy.
We all know this person — you know, the one who refuses to give you a direct answer to an invitation. You hang up the phone, frustrated, wondering what is so complicated. You should be insulted. But don’t be. Your friend has FOMO. It is a debilitating ailment, and the only known cures are difficult and lengthy.
FOMO? It sounds fungal, perhaps worthy of another oddly-named pharmaceutical. But it’s not — it is Fear Of Missing Out. You might have it too, or a terrible case of its sibling neurosis — FOBO (Fear Of a Better Option). Both are paralyzing afflictions of those who prefer dreaming to living. In a different time, your grandmother might have lectured “Honey, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good”. But we live in an age of acronyms now, so FOMO and FOBO it is. Whatever you call them, these human frailties share one life-altering feature: They eat the seed corn of the present to fuel irrational hope for a fuzzy and uncertain future.
We live in a universe ruled by time. Whatever Einstein taught us about time being relative, it doesn’t matter at the personal level. Time is precious, the scarcest of commodities. Oh sure, stuff like oxygen is essential, but we have plenty of that when we need it. The supply of time is strictly metered, you cannot hoard or recycle it, and you cannot buy more. Whatever you waste is gone.
Economists speak of something called “opportunity cost”. It is the stuff you forfeit at any given time because you choose to do something else. It is the true cost of just about anything in this type of universe, where the arrow of time points in one direction only. You can’t spend Friday night with this person because you already committed to spending it with that person — who maybe isn’t quite as charming or brimming with possibility. Those kinds of opportunity costs are painfully real because of the way your feelings value them. But your feelings are very bad at math. Economically speaking, you always pay a price, even (perhaps particularly) when you choose to do nothing. You forfeit opportunity, which evaporates forever. And you do this continually at some level, every waking moment of your life.
FOMO and FOBO feed on feelings and desires, which all adults must learn to master rather than serve. Feelings have severe tunnel vision. We see only the opportunity cost of not getting exactly what we want, while discounting the cost of rejecting other options. But the real cost of all outcomes is the same, regardless of what our feelings say. Time is time, and the universe will extract its rent (which seems to go way up as you get older).
Plants don’t have such problems. They know nothing of FOMO. A seed falls to the ground, and it accepts its circumstance; the plant will happily spend its days where fate deems appropriate. You buy a sapling and decide where it should live; it accepts your decision peacefully and lives there, or at least tries its best to overcome the mistakes that amateurs and professionals routinely make with trees. You put a houseplant near a window in the winter, and it adapts patiently until summer vacation on the patio arrives. Plants are dogs that don’t bark. They acclimate to routine. They love attention, but accept their circumstance when ignored. They make a mess occasionally. And they make the best of their situations.
This is sound advice for humans too. Some might disagree, viewing such submissive thoughts as anathema to the well-lived life. Some people are trained to construct reality rather than accept it, to define their surroundings rather than live in them, to create new rules rather than respect and appreciate the sturdy old ones. Of course, there is a time and a place for those attitudes. After all, if we all just accepted our fate all of the time, the human condition would quickly revert to hunting and gathering, subsistence farming and median lifespans of thirty-five years. We are not potted plants, as Oliver North’s attorney once famously asserted. But we can still learn from them.
The roots of a seedling emerge within and through a soil matrix, hidden from view, exploring available options, negotiating walls and borders as they present themselves. When you transplant a seedling, you interrupt a delicate, intimate relationship between microscopic root networks and thousands of unique pockets in the soil structure. Such relationships develop continuously over time, as the plant embraces and explores the hand it was offered. As the roots make the best of their immediate situation in dark obscurity, constantly reaching a new accommodation with it, the sexier parts of the plant come to depend on their yeoman’s work. They too make the best of their situations, metering growth based in part on the state of supply from the roots. In this way, the plant maximizes its overall development based on circumstances that are completely outside its control. It makes the best of it.
As all gardeners would agree, plants make our world a better place through this simple act of making the best of their own circumstances. Life is an infinite entanglement of moving parts, constantly moving and shifting. When some intransigent portion of the system fails to live up to its responsibilities, the effects ripple through the immediate universe, with effects both predictable and unknown, imperceptible to catastrophic. When we make the best of our own situations, using our allotted time to the fullest, we unknowingly improve the world around us, making it easier for others to do the same. When we go about our business quietly, foregoing the venting and complaining and wishing, we set an example for others to tend to their own circumstances in their own corners of the world. And they, in turn, set their own examples.
When we inevitably uproot seedlings, it is part of a necessary growth trajectory on a path to a greater destiny. Different plants react in different ways to this sudden and severe interruption. Sturdier seedlings, like peppers and marigolds, typically laugh it off and get on with business. More sensitive plants such as cucumbers tend to whine, complain and sulk for a time, and often demand some coddling and affirmation. But they eventually get with the program too, settling in to whatever the situation dictates. They have resilience. Some have more of it than others, but we all need to nurture and grow whatever we might have by default. Life constantly presents new situations, and we are called to react and adjust. We can choose to accept and optimize, or instead opt to bury ourselves in how we would prefer the world to treat us, isolated, adrift, separated from reality, dripping with soul-sucking FOMO.
Ironically, we do sometimes lie to ourselves about making the best of it, particularly when we try to make peace with the past. It is an easy crutch. And this should not be surprising. Time moves only in one direction. Looking backwards is unnatural, and we now know that the mind can only reconstruct facsimiles of the past, which we call “memory”. So, of course, we tend to reconstruct flattering ones. And our instincts tell us what the more noble path would have been, regardless of the path we took.
We might not always make the best of things, despite whatever lies our blurred recollections choose to invent. But, when looking forward rather than backward, the option to choose that path always exists. And I believe it is the path that we should choose most of the time. There is deep beauty in becoming one with circumstance, pursuing intimate integration with surroundings, seeking peaceful equilibrium with what necessarily is and should be left undisturbed.
When we consciously make the best of things, eventually molding that intention into sweet habit, we also deflect the delusion that we are doing something more. We learn to expect it from ourselves and others. We demand it as the basic operating procedure of life, just as our beloved plants do. It becomes a baseline, the qualifying attitude for kick starting each day. I choose to make the best of this day, and I will be a better person at the end of the day than I was when I rolled out of bed.
For people who choose to live life enmeshed in civilization, community and family, much of the world that we negotiate each day is out of our control. A child is sick. A lonely relative calls at a bad time. An employer dumps an unwanted project on your lap. A good friend announces a terminal illness. The food you planned to use for dinner has spoiled. A squirrel dug up all of your lettuce seedlings. Stuff happens. The gears of life must contend with a lot of dirt and pebbles, large and small. They are the rule, not the exceptions. All of that training for constructing reality rather than accepting it, all of the will to define surroundings rather than live in them, all the desire to create new rules rather than respect the old ones – most of that melts like a candle against the flame of human reality, vaporizing into the vastness of real-world contingency. Successful, happy people learn to recognize this, developing the resilience to accept what is rather than pine for what should be.
Learn from your plants. They find a way to make the best of their surroundings. Explore the soil around you. When clouds fill the sky and the rain falls, appreciate that you have roots. When the sun peeks out, absorb the energy. And when someone picks the fruit you grew, rejoice in your contribution.
Do the best with what you have.