Imagine it is the middle of the winter. There is no food in your house. As the bread-winner, the guy who "brings home the bacon", how far would you walk, how many hours would you invest to feed your beloved and your children for one more day?
Would you say "Screw it. If it isn't on the porch they can cry themselves to sleep?" There are some people like that.
Would you say "I will walk to the end of the driveway, but that is the limit of how much effort that I will invest in keeping my wife happy and my children fed."?
Or would you say "I would walk a mile (20 minutes) to get food"? I know that almost everybody would be willing to invest 20 minute from picking up the keys, driving, waiting in the drive-through and returning if that is what it takes to feed your family for one meal.
If you had no other choice, would you be willing to walk three miles one way (an hour) and back (another hour) if it meant you could bring back enough food to feed your entire family for a day. Sadly, I think that some "men" would fail at this, but most would step-up.
Weeding the garden
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| Before: Weeded row on the right. Unweeded in the center. Somebody has been falling down on his job. |
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| After weeding. Dramatic photos are usually evidence of operator failure. The weeds should never have gotten that out-of-control. |
240' of row will grow a lot of potatoes or rutabagas or tomatoes or sweet corn.
Yes, I know, there was time invested in many other activities to make that 240 feet of row happen. But if you don't stay on top of the weeds you might as well have not planted the seeds.
What weeding is not
Weeding a garden seems so pedestrian and simple that it is baffling that it can be so valuable.
But weeding isn't subject to income tax of FICA taxes. It isn't something where you have to "cover" for the sick, the lame or the lazy who expect a pay-check but don't work.
Weeding doesn't require $6 million in tools (the cost of a single robotic work-cell circa 1996).
Weeding does not require $500 wingtip shoes or a $3000 laptop with killer graphics cards.
You don't have to take out a student loan to know how to pull weeds.
What weeding requires is that you show up and do it when it is time to do it.
Time-blindness
I think people who have ADHD lack the cognitive horse-power to envision scenarios where they might have to walk some distance and bring back food.
They also lack the background.
Those of us of a certain age might remember reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (no known relation to John Wilder) and how her future-husband, Almanzo, ventured forth in the blizzards to drag back two-tons of pounds of wheat on a sled to feed the village of De Smet, South Dakota.
That was back when men were men.
Pulling weeds when there is a pleasant breeze and the air temperature is tickling the upper 70s (F) is trivial compared to striking off across the trackless prairie in the middle of the winter looking for food. A veritable walk-in-the-park.
Self-talk
Thoughts like those are what loop through my mind as I pull weeds.
Bonus photo
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| Whole wheat tortilla, jasmine rice, Happy Rich broccoli from the garden, kielbasa. Eaten after a trip through the microwave and rolled into a burrito. |
Wow did you read the rest of that Wikipedia article about Laura Ingalls Wilder's husband?
ReplyDelete36 percent interest... How many times they were kicked down but kept getting up. How they moved to survive.
Does make pulling weeds indeed an "easy day".
BTW when you get pigs, please know a wheeled kneeling cart with a basket for those "weeds" will make the pigs really happy.
Alas, Mrs ERJ has some strong opinions about pigs and they are not favorable. I don't see pigs in our future.
DeleteIf you read the books, it quickly becomes apparent that Almanzo was an impulsive buyer of gadgets and "labor saving devices". At one point, he buys a stove designed to burn Anthracite coal. Its small firebox was unsuited to burn cottonwood or soft (common) coal or the twisted sticks they made from swamp grass. And yes, he bought it on credit.
DeleteRegarding the interest rate, it was exceptionally easy to simply decamp in the middle of the night and move 200 miles and start over. The bad credit-risks simply walked away and there was almost nothing the merchants/banks could do to recover the money they had loaned. The interest rates comprehended that flight-risk as a cost of business and adjusted the interest rates to the required levels.
Joe so does my wife, but I helped a neighbor with funding for pigs (pig share) and bring him buckets of weeds and not acceptable veggies for them.
DeleteThat they are a tad wilted when they get them doesn't seem to bother them as I add some wet cracked corn to the mix.
Pig share means I help with the pigs especially when they are off for a little vacation or are feeling under the weather. Bonus is when I am going off to vacay or such they help me.
Bacon, pork and lard. The happy trinity of my cooking.
Having ADHD is both a blessing and a curse. The time blindness I have usually shows up in learning a new skill or finding something interesting. Time doesn't exist as I study and learn.
ReplyDeleteAs far as working to find food, Dad told me he didn't think I'd ever starve. I cleaned out a hog market during high scruel every week for $20. He said anyone that kept up that job for that long wouldn't hurt for lack of work. I wound up with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and it drove me hard. 1 Tim 5:8 is probably what did it. "But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." Raising the family, If we needed more to make it, I found a side job.
I know my single experience isn't data. Just remember ADHD is a spectrum. Folks can fall anywhere from profoundly affected to impacted slightly.
To feed your kids you do what you have to do.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere I read once that the best time to pull weeds is as soon as you see them. That's pretty much how it goes around these parts. But I only have a 1/8 acre and a small urban hobby garden.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "I think people who have ADHD lack the cognitive horse-power to envision scenarios where they might have to walk some distance and bring back food", that is profoundly mis-stating what ADHD is and is not. People with ADHD span the entire spectrum of intelligence, with a slight shift of the bell curve (maybe 9 IQ points) towards the low end.
ReplyDeleteMany people with ADHD suffer from having too much cognitive horsepower, their mind free-wheels into scenarios and "what if" to the extreme.
ADHD can also manifest as hyperfocus, extreme focus on a task (say weeding a row of vegetables) to perfection and to the exclusion of other inputs. So you get a perfectly weeded garden and a worker suffering from dehydration and sunburn because he ignored his own discomfort while laser-focused on the task at hand.
Fair enough.
DeleteI was thinking of the person my wife told me about.
He was surprised, again, when his paycheck came up short because he had blown off a day of work the week before, again.
He was stunned, surprised, angry, offended...again.
It happens about every other week. He only has enough money for rent, gas and food and no fun-stuff.
And it happens over and over and over again.
He is very ADHD. Not my guess. Actual diagnosis.
As an adhd farmer with so many side quests I can’t name them all, wedding really helps me think. I mulch very heavily and try to keep up, dripping sweat and all. Sauna, workout, dinner, and clear mind are all benefits
ReplyDeleteFarmers are great think-ahead people. So are gardeners.
DeleteYou can't just wing-it and be a successful farmer.
Nice burrito
ReplyDeleteFrom that scene in The Long Winter, one of the two boys said 'God hates a coward'.
ReplyDelete2 Timothy 1:7 "For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control."
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