What my garden taught me

I have been privileged over the past 10 years to have lived with 2 beautiful gardens. The first one we created, building on some solid foundations and much of it out of blank space. The second one we inherited when we fled the city (partly to experience cold climate gardening) from 2 people who had been developing it for 19 years.

Gardens are a wonderful case of give and take. Apart from just the sensuous pleasures they grant in return for the efforts applied to them, I can see that my 2 gardens have taught me some important lessons in life.

Acceptance

We bought a beautiful crab apple tree. We had seen their spring show in other people's gardens and had a place for one, right near the frangipani and in direct line of sight from where we sat on the deck, and even from the dining table. We planted it; it took just two days for the possums to discover that it was a delicious entree to their night's foraging, and they munched the new growth, and broke branches by climbing on them to reach the higher foliage. Brigitte had read that you could discourage them by putting bamboo kebab skewers in the ground around the tree. She put about a hundred wickedly sharp skewers around the base of the crab apple, and then got worried about the dogs hurting themselves. It didn't stop the possums anyway.

We moved the crab apple down into the Japanese garden, away from the possum route we hoped. I banged four stakes in the ground around it, and put bird proofing net around the stakes as a possum barrier. The poor little crab apple never recovered. By protecting it, we put a barrier between it and our capacity to nurture it.

We dug it out and gave it to Jenny, to plant in her garden in Leura. It is growing happily, and will put on a show in spring, I expect.

Sometimes, despite our expectations, some things are not meant to be in the way we plan them to be. Our efforts to make them be that way can sometimes work against any prospect of success. Sometimes the answer is to accept that a thing will not work out; to accept that gracefully and let it go without regret. That thing, like the crab apple, may just flourish somewhere else.

Patience

I was always fascinated, ever since I first saw them, by the row of cloud trees I used to see outside the Buddhist temple near the hotel in Tokyo where I frequently stayed. The ones where the branches are cultivated so there are tufts of foliage floating like clouds in a spring-time sky. They were junipers though, and pretty slow to grow in my experience.

I thought I could take a permissible short cut and try growing a cloud tree with lilly pilly. I bought one with an undefined mass of leaves and thought I'd go home and start trimming, see what would emerge.

Something held me back though; when I looked at the plant I saw nothing cloud-like at all. Instead of starting to chop and try and force a cloud to appear, I thought I could let it grow for a little while and see what developed. Over the next few months it was hard to keep the secateurs in my pocket. But after about 12 months my abstinence was rewarded. Three main branches were growing, in a lateral enough plane to stake one shoot out on each side and leave one central stem.

So far, I have a large bank of low cumulus cloud at the base of the cloud tree, and three puffs of cirrus floating above; a couple of higher clouds are in the process of forming if I can leave them to take shape. It wasn't easy keeping the cutting implements away, and avoiding the intervention to force a result. But I reckon it's been worth the wait.

More lessons to come next post.

Lines and Squares

Whenever I walk in a London street,

I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;

And I keep in the squares.

And the masses of bears,

Who wait at the corners all ready to eat

The sillies who tread on the lines of the street,

Go back to their lairs

And I say to them "Bears,

Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"

 

My mum used to read me that when I was little. It's from a small book by A. A. Milne called "When we were very young", which also had "They're changing the guard at Buckingham Palace", and "John had Great Big Waterproof Boots on", and "Christopher Robin is saying his prayers", and plenty more little gems. I'm sure it wasn't mum's intention at the time, but "Lines and Squares" left me with a long term, strongly held superstition about where I could walk. Once I was in a fair bit of strife (only about 10 years ago, I'm ashamed to admit), and I figured it would all come out right if I didn't walk on any lines on the way to the station each morning. The problem was, the route to the station took me through the local school and across the playground. It was painted with basketball, netball and handball courts, all on top of each other. To get across the playground, I felt, and probably looked, like I was playing hopscotch.

I've been trying to kick the lines-and-squares affliction. At its root, like many afflictions, is probably fear. My friend Sarah Friis says: "Fear is our belief in our own inability to deal with an action or its consequences." Walking in the squares has been a tangible way for me to deal with that belief, I guess. The trouble is, it doesn't do anything to change the belief.

I've spent too much of my life thinking maybe I'm just a bit of a coward. Too much time being paralysed and not dealing with the thing feared. Through some hard lessons, I have found four things which help me with fear.

Recognise it

It really helps me to know when it is fear that is driving whatever current emotion I am trying to deal with. Upsetting emotions can come from sadness, grief, hurt at the plight of others – they are things you can sit with in a different way than being afraid of something. Recognising fear as the driver at any given time can almost be a relief, because then I know what I have to deal with.

Name it

It's really useful to me to be able to identify exactly what the fear is. It is not always immediately apparent, and some investigation is often needed. I spent time chasing down and articulating one fear, which I found out deep down to be the fear of being left alone. When I can name it, I can face it a whole lot more confidently.

Don't beat yourself up about it

I've done plenty of that, proclaiming myself to be a bit of a coward in the face of various fears. It doesn't help with the resolve needed to deal with the fear. I'm not alone in being afraid, and it doesn't make me less worthwhile. It just is, like being happy or feeling grief. I remind myself just to accept it as part of life.

Do something, anything

The most destructive part of fear for me is the paralysis it brings. If I have been able to recognise and name a fear, and not beat myself up about it, the final bit for me is to do something to address it. Often the smallest step I can take is the best step, perhaps because it's the easiest. Open and read that email I haven't really wanted to read. Create a document and save the file and write a heading even if I can't write the whole document just yet. Just doing one little thing usually helps to shake me out of the paralysis.

Recognising, naming, doing something – the most usual result I get is a validation of the well-worn statistic that 80% of what you fear never happens. And the other 20% - well, at least I'm not crumbling in front of it. So I'm sorry Christopher Robin, but I just want to say: "Bugger you, bears, I'm walking on the lines."

The Riding

I was on the way home from a pretty special bike ride (see the recent post on "Place") and there had been a fair bit of hooting and hollering from the joy of the ride: muddy, wet, and cold notwithstanding. I had jumped the bike over the drainage humps, and felt the giddy liberty of mid-air; I had given it its head down short steep rocky slopes hanging on grimly; I had valued the low gears grinding back up those slopes; I had felt the rush of riding really hard along the flat pebbly sections. I had thoroughly enjoyed riding my bike.

As I rode home the last few k's, still in the relatively quiet early morning, something else crept up on me in that peaceful time. Out there, in the dirt, it had been just me, my bike and the track, all having a great time together. Now, it was no longer the rider and the ridden, and the duality dropped away till it was just one thing – the riding. No need for an excited, congratulatory self, digging it all, but enough to be part of what was happening in that moment, fine to be nothing. No need for an observer to observe it, or a doer to do it. It just was. "When you recognise this, you will realise that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything" says Kalu Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama. "That is all."

The experience didn't last that long, and I drifted back to me, my bike and the road, but it was a moment of awakening. There are plenty of good things written, spoken and podcasted about non-duality by much more enlightened hearts and minds that mine. The riding, though, was an exquisite validation that when the self falls away, awareness doesn't need to; in fact it heightens, and an ordinary rural back road early on a Saturday morning can become as sacred as any temple, anywhere, even when you are splattered with mud.

****

After I wrote this blog, I came across this from Jon Kabat-Zinn in Coming to Our Senses, writing about a field near his house which he walks past each day, at different times and in different seasons:

In walking these paths, there is less and less separation between me and the view when I give myself over to attending , when I allow myself to come to and to live within my senses. Subject (seer) and object (what is seen) unite in the moment of seeing. Otherwise it is not seeing. One moment I am separate from a conventional scene as described to myself in my head. The next moment, there is no scene, no description, only being there, only seeing, only drinking in through eyes and other senses so pure they already know how to drink in whatever is presented, without any direction at all, without any thought at all. In such moments, there is only walking, or standing, or only sitting ....

Yep, that's what I'm talking' about.

Place

It's a long drive, and it was late at night. I was tired, and Brigitte was asleep in the seat beside me. But as I got closer to the destination, the tiredness fell away; and when I turned off the highway and pointed the car at Sussex inlet I felt my heart soften, and a bunch of negative vibes melted away. I drove the last 13 k's probably a bit too fast, but it was just some joy, too long hidden, bubbling out.

I had forgotten the importance of place. There are plenty of things which we can use to make sense of an imperfect and shifting world, but place can be taken for granted. With somewhere like Sussex Inlet, for me, place can be inter-woven with emotional threads reaching back 45 years, from late childhood, to teenage surf zealot, to gonzo uni student, to young father and now (young, I hope) grandfather. I don't believe, though, that the peace which settled on me on Friday night was just about happy memories. The place was speaking to me.

I got up early the next morning, with only my son Tim and baby Kennadie awake at that hour, and snuck out on my bike. I turned onto a vaguely familiar dirt road, was dive-bombed by a currawong, and had a black wallaby race across my path. It was early, it was muddy, and no other fool but me was out there in the conditions; I had it all, all to myself. The road was fast in spots, and in others the bike sank to its axles (and my feet) in cold dirty water stretching right across the path. The conditions didn't matter. Fast or boggy, descending or slogging uphill, the place was special and granted just to me. My hoots of exuberance bounced off the trees and mystified the black cockatoos. On the way home, I pulled in at a little look-out with a view over the rocky cove which had been one of the favoured, treasured surf spots and I connected with the place, as well as the memories.

I stood on the wharf at sunset, Kennadie on my hip and the tumble-down trees edging the far bank; the evening light tinting the clouds, mirrored in the ruffled water. A place like many others, I guess, but a place to me.

It's there if you let it be there. Feel it through your feet, or your pedals, or even the car's tyres. Place can touch you, caress you, restore you. You just have to keep your senses open so that when you get to the right place, the link is made.

Three lessons from my father

I have just had that gut-wrenching experience of putting my dear father in a nursing home, for permanent high-level care. A bloke who, in his prime, could turn his hand to anything from the dark art of cost accounting to the greasing and oil-changing of a 1937 Dodge.

Probably from having been a teenager in the sixties, I can see now that I spent a lot of time devising lessons about what not to do in life, based on an opposition to some of what he did, which from here looks pretty self-righteous on my part.

Now, as he sits in his favourite chair, diminished, I see glimpses of the younger, resourceful, capable dad. I have started to collect the positive lessons from my father. Here are three strong and memorable ones for me:

Keep your left hand behind the cutting edge

When you are holding the chisel in one hand, and the piece of wood in the other, you don't want to be in the position where, if the chisel jumps, you end up chiselling yourself. Keeping your left hand behind the cutting edge was just a piece of dad's common sense imparted to young, enthusiastic but impetuous carpenters who went down the shed to "make something". When I look back, it was also about risk management. You can take some simple enough steps to prevent damage, without really compromising the ability to achieve the outcome. Apply a bit of care to the way you set something up, and then execute it. Think about it while you are doing it. Keep your form.

On another level it's about what is worth what. Seemingly keeping that bit of wood a bit steadier with your hand in front of the chisel, and risking a deep gash and some stitches – or taking it a bit slower, even clamping the wood to the bench instead. Sometimes the bit of extra time saved, or the effort, isn't really worth it.

You can have a go at really big things

My dad was, by training, experience and inclination, an accountant. That didn't stop him from tackling some really big projects. We had a block of land down the south coast. With four kids at school, the only way there was going to be a holiday house, in dad's view, was if he built it himself. There was room down the back, in the chook pen, to build a set of dummy foundations. At his workplace, the temporary office premises where he had been overseeing a factory start-up, were being pulled down. He bought the discarded timber beams for a song, each one of them 12 inches x 2 inches (that's 250 mms x 50 mm), and a giant saw-bench that the builders had been using. He ripped the big beams into 4x2s and 3x2s for the frame of the new holiday house.

He built the roof first, sitting it on the dummy brick piers. It was a hip roof, not an easy-way-out gable roof. That meant a whole lot of compound mitre cuts, blending two different angles, for all those rafters as they met the hip coming down from the ridge. I wish I had watched all that, and got dad to show me how to use that thing with all the dials and numbers called a "rafter-graph". I have tried to cut compound mitre joints since and I know how hard they are to pull off. He must have cut 25 or 30 of them. He assembled the roof with the double-headed nails they use for concrete formwork; numbered all the beams; then pulled it apart easily because of those clever nails. Then he built the wall frames. Left them intact, hired a bloke with a truck and had it all carted down the coast. We all had a hand in putting it back together, dad and my brothers and I. It's still there 40 years later. And everyone still loves going there.

Building a house isn't something your average accountant does. Dad did, because he was prepared to have a go at it – at something really big.

Bricolage

There's a current trend called "decluttering", throwing out anything that you don't need for the present or the immediate future. There is, however, a competing theory known as "bricolage": taking whatever you might have at hand, and using it to address whatever need you currently have – even if it means having stuff around, just in case you might need it to address such a need. Dad always had a fair amount of stuff down the back. It is arguable that he had too much of it. (Actually, it's undoubtable). But his first response to doing a job was to assess what he already had, rather than writing out a shopping list and then going out to buy it. A wedge to keep a door open. A bookshelf. A set of swinging boards to hold scores of tools in a confined space. That idea of thinking about how some issue, some challenge, can be dealt with by using what you already have, has been a wonderfully helpful, life-long example to me. Even though it means I have to find somewhere to keep that supply of assorted lengths of timber, empty containers, a variety of fasteners and a wide array of seldom used tools – just in case.

I reckon bricolage applies just as importantly to people. I have twice started new jobs, each time with advice from the HR director that "you really need to get rid of so-and-so out of your department – we thought we would wait till you started so you could do it." Each of those two so-and-sos were not "got rid of" – they knew a whole lot more than me about the company and the job I was supposed to be doing, and they were already at hand. Each of them re-invented themselves to be consecutively the two best, most loyal team members I ever had. So often, it's all about what is already in the kitbag.

What I find sad now is that I can't tell dad about the importance of those three lessons to me. His cognitive ability has slipped just beyond the capacity to take it in. I tried a little while ago to remind him, on his Father's Day card, of "keep your left hand behind the cutting edge", and he just gave me a friendly smile. So I learned one more lesson out of the whole process: acknowledge the lesson to the teacher while they can still appreciate the acknowledgement. But dad: thanks anyway.

E+R=O

This is a great insight from my mate Liam Forde.

The first thing that comes into your head when something happens is often not the best thing. Something or someone may have pushed one of your buttons. I've been particularly prone to that if something looks like injustice, or if someone else is taking credit for something I've done. Your first reaction is probably not your intuition speaking. It's more likely to be patterned behaviour, or be fuelled by adrenalin in a 'flight or fight' response. What you don't get then is an opportunity to work out what the best response, as opposed to the first response, may be. When the event happens, the response, whatever it may be, will determine the outcome. Event plus response equals outcome - E+R=O.

You may not, probably will not, control the event. What you can control is the response, and you can therefore influence, or even drive, the outcome. There's just one thing you need to do that: Stop! Before you speak, before you act - stop, examine what you are about to do or say, maybe take a breath. The Buddhists call it "the sacred pause". Then decide what your response will be, rather than let your adrenaline, or your hot buttons, or even your prejudices, decide it for you. It happened to me a while ago, when my wife claimed credit for an idea that I reckoned I had, and I jumped right in and said '"No, that was my idea". And it didn't actually matter a damn whose idea it was, and a great response would have been to say nothing. Or even better, to have said "Great idea darling."

This, of course, does not apply to emergency or life-threatening situations, where you may have to act immediately and by reflex. But generally, you have a choice. As my old boss Russ Hewitt said, "Shit happens, suffering is optional". When an event happens, your response dictates or strongly influences the outcome. E+R=O. Your choice.

What if you don’t really need the money?

My father had what I would have called the great good fortune to be retrenched at 57. After nearly 40 years with the one company. The retrenchment was due to the closure of a joint venture plant which had reached the end of its economic life. So there was no shame in it, and I don't think he felt any. His long service with the company made the retrenchment financially advantageous to him.

But over the next few years I watched my dad's internal clock slowly wind down, and twenty years later it hardly ticks at all. Dad had a bit of a part-time job for a while, but it seemed to fizzle out. As best I could work out, he didn't really need the money at the time, and there didn't appear to be anything left to fire him up, or keep him busy beyond counting the collection plates after church on Sunday mornings.

I find myself in a similar kind of position of "not really needing the money." My life joint venture partner might well respond "what's need got to do with it?" But I have caught myself once or twice, recently, thinking that it's pretty relaxing spending an hour to read the paper thoroughly in the morning, then put in a solid couple of hours in the garden before having a coffee in the village.

During one of those recent thorough newspaper readings, I came across a reference to Oscar Niemeyer, the famous architect, "still busy at work at 102." That, and a few other nudges from different directions, have set me thinking about what is the spark which must keep glowing, to make "semi-retirement" the vibrant, valuable, worthwhile stage it ought to be? A very relevant question at 56, with plenty of "lifestyle options" available to keep me fully, though not perhaps meaningfully, entertained.

The drivers which I am about to share are of course very personal ones, and unavoidability tinted with the colours of a later-in-life spiritual journey of which work is just a part. But here they are, for the record if nothing else.

Mortality

I have been to funerals over the past few years of good people who have left this earth in their 40s, 50s and early 60's. There are no guarantees. While the statistics say I have 21.9 years left here, in coming to an average there are always low scores to offset the big numbers. I still feel the pressure of things in my head, in my history, which I think are worth extracting, crystallising, applying in new circumstances, and passing on to others. Lessons which I may have learned at someone else's expenses, and are thereby tinged with a karmic obligation. Hard-earned insights which might save someone else pain and suffering if shared. What if the 21.9 years are 10, or 5, or 6 months, or tomorrow? Things often feel like they are queuing up inside me for dissemination, and I have to get as many of them out, and shared, and applied, as fast as possible. Just in case.

Service

It seems to be more common these days that people in their middle years have a view about "giving something back". To me there are a couple of supervening reasons to keep going in service of meaningful goals. The first one is gratitude. I've received plenty of lucky breaks in life and garnered lots of advantages. To undertake worthwhile things helps balance the celestial ledger. The second one is something that the Buddhists call "right livelihood", which asks us to love our world through our work. Aligning "love for the world" with our jobs when we are full tilt at our careers isn't always a simple process. I have found that there is inevitably greater scope for this kind of work/world love alignment once the imperatives of career advancement and family support diminish – like, it's never too late. Kahlil Gibran said: "All work is empty save when there is love, for work is love made visible."

The dividend from this alignment is the well known outcome that when you give something back and help others, you can't avoid helping yourself.

Purpose

I've been very fortunate over the past 7 or 8 years to have had mentors who have shown me the power of having a considered, articulated, explicit purpose in life, and who have helped me to discover my own purpose. At a vocational level, that purpose is to help people and organisations find clarity and direction. Just to be pursuing those "lifestyle options" will not be enough to help deliver on my purpose. Purpose stands as a measure against which both the big issues, and the small stuff, can be compared.

Renewal

Being involved in real work means I spend time with smart young people. Their talent, their energy, their ideas, spark me up and put the kind of charge in my batteries that I can't find in books, blogs or discussions with my peers. I'm working with one young star at the moment in a context she calls "thought partnering". That is a generous description in my view because she's actually showing me how to do something outside my current skill set. Hopefully I am adding something back in the thought partnering process. Another renewal effect comes from working as part of a team, instead of just running a solo operation, and feeling the rewards of shared endeavour.

Doing it anyway

There is a piece of wisdom called "The Paradoxical Commandments". They were mistakenly attributed, for a long time, to Mother Teresa. It doesn't matter what the source is; it's the wisdom that counts. They have been helpful to me in showing that good and important things might as well be done whether or not they are to stand the test of time, whether or not they set up some kind of legacy. They also help me to be conscious of not wanting to accumulate good deeds in service of my own legend. Some of the commandments which most connected with me were:

• "What you spend years building, someone may destroy overnight. Build anyway"
  
• "The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow. Do good anyway."
  
• "Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give the world the best you've got anyway."
  

Self-esteem

It's not very altruistic, I suppose, but I just feel better about myself when I am doing things that matter, and aren't focused only on me. That same caveat, of being careful not just to be acting in service of my own legend, is important in this context: pride is very close to self-esteem on the merit continuum.

This all started out with my dad. It looks like an exercise based on what I learnt not to do from him, but I am grateful for the positive lesson drawn from his example. What I do know is that I had two big advantages which my dad didn't – I had him for a father and my mum for a mother. Those are other stories yet to be told.