Self-talk

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

Before: Weeded row on the right. Unweeded in the center. Somebody has been falling down on his job.

 

After weeding. Dramatic photos are usually evidence of operator failure. The weeds should never have gotten that out-of-control.

For the sake of argument, let's say that I can hand-weed* two-feet of row a minute. That means I can weed 40' in 20 minutes, 120' in an hour or 240' in two hours...the time it takes to make a round-trip three miles away-and-back on foot.

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

Whole wheat tortilla, jasmine rice, Happy Rich broccoli from the garden, kielbasa. Eaten after a trip through the microwave and rolled into a burrito.

*Hand-weed: On hands-and-knees, identifying  the plants that should stay and pulling everything else using one's hands.