NOTE: This is Chapter 17 of my online book. Enjoy.
About thirty years ago in my corner of suburbia, nestled along the mini beltway that encircled the local mall megalopolis, was a retail store called Best. Not Best Buy — just Best. Best sold slightly posher furniture, jewelry and household goods than you might find at the K-Mart a half mile down the road, but it was still firmly in discount territory. It was a junior varsity mall-store wannabe. But the posing didn’t faze me. As a young father on a budget, I became a Best fanboy, buying everything from jewelry, to not one but two sets of cheap china, to not one but two glider rockers. Most of these sweet deals somehow remain in the household years later, although one of the glider rockers evolved into a built-in laundry basket in recent decades. But the purchase that compels this story is a dark cherry vanity, which came with a matching bench topped by a sweet floral fabric cushion. It wasn’t real cherry, of course, except for a few modest veneers. This was full-on Ikea-mode furniture, not shy about assembly. That was the Best lane, fitting for a young father still assembling a life.
Such furniture impersonates a coherent whole for a time, but time and entropy eventually betray its true nature as a bundle of low-precision parts. As the screws loosen over time, twisting forces conspire in complex ways — ways that designers in faraway factories generally choose to ignore. When those screws anchor the legs of a bench to a seat, the day inevitably arrives when your wife sits on the bench but lands on the floor. And the faux wood frame rips apart like Hulk Hogan tearing a phone book in half. After the invectives subside, you come to terms with the limitations of medium density fiberboard.
What happens next divides the citizens of our modern technocracy, like so much broken tribal discourse. In one group are the folks who declare the thirty-year experiment both successful and over; they gather the pieces and shards, perhaps allow a moment or two of nostalgic reflection, but then promptly deposit the shattered remains of an era in the trash. In the other group are the romantics, people who gently cradle the stack of shredded particle board and fabric, then escort it to the garage workbench for later assessment, or at least for a more appropriate period of mourning. If a path to resurrection emerges during that time, they prepare a plan of redemption that might restore the broken bench to its former glory.
Count me in Group #2. The bench survived.
Some men like to fix things. Many women do too, but Hallmark culture often frames this as a male instinct, while redefining it as a universal design flaw – as in “you just want to fix things.” But this is who I am. My instinct is to redeem the thirty year-old vanity bench, even if its origin story begins at a long-defunct, obscure discount retailer rather than on 5th Avenue, its substance and sinew steeped in industrial shrapnel and resin rather than hardwood. For me, there is a grace and dignity in such redemption that transcends cold spreadsheets, almost as Hemingway viewed courage.
Most people wander down such paths of self-discovery over time, coming to terms with favored instincts. People like me prefer to fix things; others enjoy the cool calculus of disposing and replacing. Some like to make money; others like to spend it. Some people catch fish; others prefer theirs predeceased in supermarkets. Or not at all. Humans seek comfort zones. We practice what we know and do what we do well. We find excuses to apply our personal expertise to just about anything. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, “When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” The nails are validating. We tend to construct our lives where the nail population is high, so that we get to use our hammers as much as possible. But life doesn’t always cooperate. More often than not, our pet hammers range from useless to destructive.
And this is why effective humans learn to read the room.
Successful gardeners learn to read the rooms in their back yards. Gardens are modern Ships of Theseus; both observer and observed change constantly. The garden at the end of the growing season, with its ripe tomatoes and desiccated winter squash vines, bears little resemblance to the modest plot of hopeful roots and greens that starts the growing season in March. The concerns of April are not the concerns of September.
Dewy summer mornings are a great time to read your garden room, and meet it where it is. Fresh coffee in tow, you stroll around the grounds, the surreal rays of the sunrise streaking across the landscape. Surprises emerge most days. Very often that new thing is pleasant — the next in a long line of zucchinis, another ripe tomato, an embarrassment of new flowery riches in the cutting garden, a nervous hummingbird that demands your best statue impersonation. But your plant therapist radar remains active, as you probe and observe, listening to what the plants are telling you today. This isn’t the time to repair that leaning trellis, or to spray those kale plants with BT, or to prune that overly ambitious tomato plant. There is a reason that you brought your coffee cup rather than a set of pruning shears. Leave those favored hammers in the shed for now. This isn’t tool time. It is time to assess, understand and appreciate. Yesterday is over. Today will bring new joys, new challenges.
You might see some egg cases on the kale leaves, the progeny of those flighty white butterflies that dance through the rows on sunny days in June. And maybe you also notice the wasp nest on the fence, indifferent to you, instead preparing to farm the little caterpillars that emerge from the egg cases. Sometimes reading the room means seeing the built-in solutions and getting out of the way.
You shift your gaze to the cucumbers, and you see that an intransigent squirrel has excavated a few recent transplants, now wilting in the burgeoning morning sun. Sometimes reading the room means recognizing triage situations — and this is one of them. You set your coffee cup aside for a moment and return the plants to the soil, leaving final repairs to a follow-up visit. They will need some therapy later, but, for now, a hug will do.
Sometimes reading the room means respecting eternal truths. In the garden, the greatest of these is water. Plants need it, and they depend on the outside world to obtain it. So, yes, this is a time to water — you can observe while watering. You can tend to life’s non-negotiables while remaining attentive to life’s dynamics.
Learning to listen and observe can be difficult. We interact with the world as though it were static; we expect reality to conform to our prejudices and experience. But it refuses. The world and its challenges are always more intricate than we like to believe, always one step ahead. Our lives teem with inconvenient special cases that we prefer to shove into abstract boxes that convey the illusion of recognizable shapes. We prefer a less dimensional world, where similar problems are equal problems, and where our limited tool sets, comparative advantages and personal success stories will always apply. Where things stand still. But this is not the world we inhabit. For many gardeners, the go-to hammer is “fertilizer”. But concentrated fertilizer is almost never the answer. It will break soil before it improves it. And so it is with most hammers. Hammers mostly break things.
The universe and human family that we inherit are complex beyond our imagination. We owe them attentiveness and humility. Sometimes that means listening to a loved one vent, because nothing you might say or do will fix anything, nor is he or she looking for a solution. Our gardens whisper to us all the time (and occasionally shout); the effective gardener never stops listening. The world whispers and shouts too. Yes, the din drips with white noise nowadays, and it is tempting to tune out — I plead no contest. But important signals do lurk in all that noise. Sometimes we can drop a personal sonobuoy into the vast digital sea that swirls around us, and reel in a secret worth knowing, or an opportunity worth having, or a need worth meeting. Just tune to the correct frequency of the room you inhabit. And listen.
Modern western orthodoxy teaches us to mold the world to our hammers. Elite universities preach a distorted concept of “leadership” that involves bending the world to one’s superior will. Even gardeners are sold the idea that they can micromanage landscapes with simple chemicals. These are all destructive, unsustainable ideas. Friedrich Nietzsche — the famed (and, sadly, highly influential) late nineteenth century philosopher — died of madness, stewing in a cauldron of demonic self-indulgence, tortured by the lie that he was the sculptor and reality was his clay. But humans aren’t built for that. Yes, there is a time to sculpt. But most of the time we are well advised to read the rooms we inhabit, meet the inhabitants on their own terms, and adjust with reverent care.
Measure twice, cut once.