I don't want to do that

 

I hoovered my grass today. Miracles happen. 

Anyone who knows me knows I am not a gardener. I struggle to keep a houseplant alive never mind make a garden look beautiful. My peace lily flowered for the first time in a number of years this summer - not through me doing anything to it apart from put in a sink of water whilst I went away to make sure it got watered. I put a spider plant (a baby from my friend's very fertile spider plant which continues to fill her shed with more and more spider plants) outside after there were annoying little mites on it and it died in the storms. It's now started to grow into two spider plants. All I did was feed it some stale bread - well put it on the table around it for the birds and something happened. I grow weeds like I am an expert weed gardener and cultivate a favoured habitat for frogs in my grass. Cutting the grass makes me itchy and has started to give me headaches leaving me with no option but to lie down for the rest of the day. I occasionally have a burst of 'I'm going to do this' and plant new plants in a bed I have cleared a couple of times and if you look between the weeds you can see there is still a hope of something happening, perhaps, one day that won't be a wilderness. I'm not even bothered about sitting in the garden - I don't know whether it's because it's a mess or I'm just not bothered - although in the south in a sunny garden (if it wasn't for the healthy growing trees) I can see the attraction. 

But sometimes I know I've got to do the jobs I don't want to do. 

So today I decided to at least tackle the grass. I started by pulling out the giant weeds. I nearly pulled a muscle. I think they gave me a rash. Then I decided the sensible thing to do was to strim the grass. The strimmer started smoking (it clearly doesn't know it is bad for it). I unplugged it, gave up and sat down, defeated. 

Two hours later I got a second wind and got my lawnmower out and hack-hoovered the grass. It's still a mess, there were moments when my lawnmower suggested it might want to take up smoking, the vicious sounds being made by trying to chop up the hiding small plastic balls, but it's shorter, and there is hope that the garden could become something more than the wilderness it was settling into. 

Sometimes you've got to do the jobs you don't want to do. Like the gardening if you are not a gardener, or the cleaning of the drains, or disposing of excessive amounts of gravy (that for some reason makes me want to hurl), or facing a difficult situation where you wonder if the process is worth the end results. It would be great if, like on a computer game, you could just press a button and everything would be perfect, but that's not the reality of life. 

We need to remember that facing those jobs we don't want to do but need doing is rarely a thankless task. The impact that we make may seem small,  but once it's done, even if we can't see much achieved, it makes the next part of the journey possible, even if it means mowing the grass again to make it look better along the way, even if it itches and you need to lie down for a while afterwards. 

Sometimes stuff in life is hard and presents you with jobs you don't want to do or face. That conversation you've been putting off, that change you need to make, that thing you need to stop or start that you don't want to even contemplate, it's very likely that facing it and the rashes it gives you on the way will be a small step on the way to making things better. It might mean developing your spirit of perseverance and resilience or learning new ways to be tactful and graceful or facing what feels like an endurance race, but when the job is done it's done, and you can begin to move on. 

Go on.... 

I'm going to have a go at weeding next.