Last weekend we went for a drive. I live in the Pacific Northwest where it is beautiful year round. As we drove down the freeway on our way home I noticed a nursery that had closed about two years ago. It was a beautiful nursery, really big, big selection of trees, a wide variety of beautiful flowers and unique vegetable starts. I loved to shop there and was sad when it closed. As we drove past it I noticed that everything was overgrown. Even the road leading to the nursery was barricaded by the trees and shrubs that had once lined the path in. Everything looked abandoned and unkempt.
Every day I choose to go out into my garden and pull a few weeds. There are a lot of them and they seem to spring up from nowhere. They seem to grow right back after I pull them. They come up even when I mulch them. Weeds are just a fact of life when you have a garden. Today I pulled about a hundred of the little invaders. One of them was particularly stubborn, with huge, deep roots. It took a shovel and lots of effort to pull it out. I know that if I don’t pull weeds all the time, they will take over my garden. Just like the beautiful nursery that had become overgrown. It will be a lot harder to get rid of the weeds if I don’t pull them regularly.
When I am out in the garden I can’t help but notice there are many lessons that I can apply to my life.
All of us have thoughts that are like weeds, they get out of control if left alone (think of a thought spiral), they pop up where they shouldn’t be, some have really, really deep roots – and they are hard to get rid of.
I spend 10-15 minutes every day doing my own self-coaching I take a look at my thoughts, writing them down and keeping the thoughts that work for me, just like I keep the flowers, veggies and fruit in my garden. I look at the thoughts that are causing me trouble. I recognize them by how I feel when I think them. They are the ones that keep me stuck, cause me pain or make me want to control everyone around me. I regularly work on pulling them out. Some are so easy to get rid of and some have huge deep roots. These take more time and effort to get rid of. The thing is, that just like weeds in the garden, they come back if you don’t stay on top of them.
It was so interesting to see the abandoned overgrown nursery on the freeway last weekend. I wonder if that is how my thoughts would be if I just ignored them…
