Treat your life like a farm

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today.”

I’m starting to change the way I think about life. I get the same train every week from Worcester to London. It travels through endless sleepy fields, streams and forests, stunning and haunting to look at, depending on the time of day and year.

Sometimes I wish I could spend more time in these lush, sun soaked meadows and streams, other times I think how lucky I am that my job is indoors when the train is battered with rain and the inevitable floods happen.

What it’s made me realise is that, this is a weather cycle that is visible and understandable. Ryan Holiday has a great quote “if it’s not in my control, don’t worry about it”.

Well how, in a world of online digital coworking and comfort controlled offices, do we account for things that are out of our control emotionally when we can’t visualise things in the same way a farmer can. What I mean is, a farmer doesn’t get burnout from bad weather, because they know it isn’t in their control and the bad weather will pass and there is no point losing mental energy over it. But it’s much harder to do that in an office environment. We worry about that promotion we are chasing, the boss we feel isn’t giving us enough attention, that project we lost, or competition we wished we won. And that’s just work, home life can also pile on the pressure, an ill child, and aging grandparent, mortgage repayments. Then there are friends, physical fitness and on and on.

There is so much cognitive load, that at times it’s overwhelming and far harder to understand what is in our control and what isn’t. What we should invest more of our time into and what is bad weather and will pass.

So, to return to the farm analogy, I now start to think of things as fields in my life. Family, work, friends, physical health, career, hobbies etc. each morning I survey that farm and decide which fields are yielding good crop, which ones need ploughing, (excuse the pun) and which need my immediate attention. But also being aware that the weather can be represented as mental health. 

“Sometimes it’s positive, sunny, perfect weather, it’s to be enjoyed, other times it’s raining and windy and miserable. Both are normal. Both are predictable, enjoy life in good weather, anticipate the bad weather and know it won’t last forever.”

But also these fields take time to mature, it’s slow, almost imperceptibly slow. Glacial change. But planned and also a lot of the time the hard work at the beginning isn’t visible. In fact to a lot of people it may look like you're going backwards. A nice field is suddenly reduced to a war torn battle ground of churned earth. But you have a plan, you know what you want that future to look like, so you took long term action. You weathered the bad weather, you tended to your plans and relationships come rain or shine and in time you will reap the rewards. Again the first time you reap the rewards, they might be marginal, but you learn for next season, life is a cyclical process.

Your family, work, mental health, finances all need careful forward thinking to work. There is a fine balance to it all. It takes time. There is a lot of trial and error, but stick with it and you will yield results.