On Gardening and Life

I cannot imagine a better atmosphere for writing. I am sitting outside on my patio with thunder in the distance, the air cool and wet from rain only moments before. The air smells like I am only steps from a lake and coffee tastes like vacation.

Couldn’t pass up an opportunity to write in this.

I spent my youth and teenage years reading. I still read nightly, but I do not devote nearly as much time to it as I used to due to adult life (I KNOW you guys know what I’m talking about here – free time is at a premium!) ANYWAY I absolutely loved classic literature when I was younger (still do!) because it opened me up to all kinds of knowledge and life views and experiences that I was desperate for. I also LOVE that the common threads of humanity are woven across centuries – people are people no matter where and when they lived. This is probably why I like studying history so much. Anyhow, there are lots of books that impacted the way I view life but today, I have one in particular (and specifically one quote!) that I want to talk about (pretty sure I sound like an English professor, and you thought you got AWAY from school! MUAHAHA!) Candide.

The quote, translated is this: “We must cultivate our own garden”

(well it varies depending on the translation, but essentially this is it. You get the point.)

A VERY quick synopsis of Candide (if you haven’t read it, or just have forgotten about it like  a normal human being because you read it a million years ago in school and you’re not a freak like me) is that the title character, Candide, is a young naive man who goes through and encounters a series of RIDICULOUSLY terrible situations (we’re talking Monty Python level ridiculously terrible) and the man (his tutor, essentially)  he is traveling with is quick to remind him that no matter what is happening, they are living in the “best of all possible worlds” (said to the man who is missing limbs and was sold into slavery by his mother, for example.) He is optimistic to a point of absurdity. The book is a satire on certain philosophies and religion but I won’t get into all that. PS I absolutely love satire, so if you see a lot of that in this blog, well now you know why 😉

The quote “We must cultivate our own garden.” is at the end of the book, and essentially means that YOU are responsible for your circumstances and if you want to live a meaningful life, then you need to cultivate it. Fate is not responsible for your success or your happiness and sometimes things suck. Life is not always grand. If you want any spot of happiness, you need to figure out what it is you are trying to attain, and work on it.

I think of this often – I think about what I want out of life as a whole, what I want to achieve that month or even that day,  and then I make a plan and work on it. Sure there are moments of random, times of serendipity and times of terrible things that I could have done nothing about – but what I do WITH those things, how I handle them, THAT – I control. I cultivate an environment that enables me to persevere and learn the best way that I am able. There is no better example of this than actually cultivating a literal garden (which is why, I believe, Voltaire uses that analogy.) You prepare your earth, choose what to plant and when, take care of it, and watch what you have cultivated flourish. If you make a mistake, sometimes it’s the end of the plant, and sometimes it’s not. But do you give up? Or do you cut it back, tend to it frequently, and try to bring it back?

I know which person I am, which are you?