Can We Really Learn to Love the Weeds?

lady-bug. Creative Commons license

dominocat. Creative Commons license

Becoming mature means learning to accept what you cannot change, facing unresolved sorrows and learning to love life as it really happens, not as you would have it happen.
—Barbara Sher

I realize that humor isn’t for everyone. It’s only for people who want to have fun, enjoy life, and feel alive.
—Anne Wilson Schaef

There’s an old Sufi story about accepting imperfection:

Mulla Nasrudin decided to start a flower garden. He prepared the soil and planted the seeds of many beautiful flowers. But when they came up, his garden was filled not just with his chosen flowers but also overrun by dandelions.

He sought out advice from gardeners all over and tried every method known to get rid of them but to no avail. Finally he walked all the way to the capital to speak to the royal gardener at the sheik’s palace.

The wise old man had counseled many gardeners before and suggested a variety of remedies to expel the dandelions but Mulla had tried them all. They sat together in silence for some time and finally the gardener looked at Nasrudin and said, “Well, then I suggest you learn to love them.”

An Experiment in Loving the Weeds

Learning to love the weeds in our lives…that’s an idea worth playing with. The big challenge for me this week was working on income tax. So to get in the proper frame of mind I thought of my new role model and asked, “What would a dolphin do? How would he handle it?” Another way of asking this question is “How can I get this done and enjoy the process?” Once I looked at it this way, the answer was easy. I love puzzles such as such as Word Jumble and Sudoku, and parts of doing income tax isn’t that much different. It’s just figuring out what part of the tax code applies to us and where to put the information we’ve accumulated during the year.

That’s mostly a word-logic puzzle, so I did some warm-ups with Word Jumble…it seemed to activate the same part of the brain that I would be using. And it got me into the ideal problem-solving state: a curious mind in a relaxed body. I also cleared off the dining room table so I could spread out my papers and not have to fumble through them to find what I needed. And I allowed myself plenty of time so I could take a break as often as I wanted.

Results
On the whole the experiment worked well. I enjoyed it, and I didn’t get frustrated when I had to think for a while to figure something out. That meant the process probably went a lot faster than if I had been pushing to get it done.

The only downside was I got hooked by Word Jumble and spent more time playing with that than I had intended. But that’s a topic for next week’s blog! I think it went so well not just because I approached it with the right attitude, but also because I’ve been practicing that mindfulness…a curious but patient mind in a relaxed body… a lot this past year. All those hours working on my two blogs (this one and the one at Cheerful Monk) have really paid off.

So, can we enjoy the weeds in our lives? As we can see from the pictures above, dandelions can be beautiful if you stop to look at them rather than being upset because they’re “ruining” your garden. And I dare say, there are probably a lot more things in my life that I can enjoy if I just stop fighting them. So I suppose the stress-hardy thing to do is take Nasrudin’s attitude—by all means try to get what you want. But if that doesn’t work, do your best to love life just the way it is.

This site is presented as food for thought. Please share your views in the comments section.

Thanks to bikehikebabe for commenting on last week’s post.