How life and your yard are the same

25 Aug 2023

I think there are some similarities between my yard and life in general. We try and spruce up our yards by adding decorative rocks, lighting, and flower beds along with more pragmatic items like bird feeders, garden hoses, and irrigation. I think in the same way, we try to balance things we should have from the perspective of others and things we ourselves want to have in our own lives. We embrace the useful aspects of our life and hope we can incorporate some more decorative elements into those. I think it's optimal to try and reduce the proportion of things we do out of roles to things we do of our own choosing to below 0.5 or so. Too much willpower spent to push the rock up the hill as a chore instead of as exercise makes you too willing to obey. Both obligatory and discretionary activities are important, as I may not necessarily want to eat healthy now, for example. You then overcome your innate desire with each temptation and before long you actually enjoy carrots. This was my experience with moving to a plant-based diet where my taste preferences steered drastically away from salty and sweet foods. This was also my experience during my third year of medical school, when I initially was quite perturbed by being watched routinely and evaluated by various people around me each month (nerve-wracking if you ask me!). It's kind of amazing though that, over time, what we do over and over becomes what we prefer to do and becomes our modus operandi.

Every time I drive up to my house, I take a look at my yard because what else is there to look at when I'm walking up the driveway? Likewise, we need to frequently re-evaluate how we are taking care of our own lives, our own yards. What kind of things can I do to force myself to reevaluate? I think one cool way to do this is through a journaling practice. I recently tried to create a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday journaling template (questions linked at the end of this article) in Day One for the morning and evening. (There's four distinct sets of questions then, which I thought was pretty cool. I also created a weekly recap set of questions for the weekends, which I think strikes a balance between being too burdensome, but also being a cool change up. I recently was telling someone that one of my biggest fears in life is falling into a rut and not really knowing it. Thankfully, I think there are some natural safeguards to this in the fact that we as humans like variation. I think having a basal level of variation in the things that you do is really important and just the fact that you've done something the same for a long period of time should be a mental precautionary alert to you to try and purposely do that activity differently just in the off chance a better way exists. Like how we consult landscaping companies to make sure that our flowers and grass are looking as good as they possibly can, in life we need to consult other people like life coaches and mental health care workers when we have doubts that we are growing as optimally as possible. Who doesn't want a good-looking yard? I don't think we add decorative elements to our lives just because we want other people to see. Gardeners take great pride in having a pretty flower bed and similarly we find satisfaction in creating and tailoring our lives to what we want our lives to be. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs immediately comes to mind with self-determination at the top!

Like how a yard needs rain and sun, what kind of things are feeding us? What kind of things am I feeding myself and how can I make sure that I'm getting the optimal doses of the things that I need? A yard needs the basics of water and sun, but it also needs a lot of different minerals like nitrogen, phosphorus, and oxygen in the soil and air to grow and be as beautiful, as flowering, as majestic as it can be. What kind of things in my life are supporting me and I don't necessarily recognize? What immediately comes to mind is family that I don't thank enough, mentors I haven't told how much I appreciate, and authors who've spoken to me but will never know their impact. How can I add more advanced formulas of fertilizer to my life, one with more ingredients? I would say that the OG fertilizer for life is a relationship with Jesus (like how there is no baby formula as good as breast milk!). But in the ingredients of my life that I do have control over, am I really aware and conscious of choosing them? If it is indeed true that what we do over and over becomes what we naturally enjoy doing of our own volition over time in a sequential way, this is profound. This means that the little choices we make become our Amazon subscriptions that automatically get thrown on over time. Have you ever had that happen? And you just don't remember placing that order? I think this is why consulting with a lawn care team of people around you, family, therapists, coaches, co-workers, significant others. I think this is why consulting with a lawn care team of people around you, family, therapists, coaches, co-workers, significant others. It's a vital process. A lawn not growing is a lawn dying.

 I would say this is partly what interests me about lifestyle medicine, why I'm helping put a lifestyle medicine class together for my medical school and why I like ways of coming alongside traditional treatments and medications and the three small publications I've yet written in my life. In summary, broken math equations are fascinating: easy tweaks that come together to add up to something greater than what their sum should be. How can I help others get more of these equations?