“Your life is a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers or you can grow weeds.” It says it right there and yet here I am…. I’ve been growing weeds for a good week now. You might be wondering why I’m writing about this…. this has nothing to do with homeschooling right? I think it does because it doesn’t matter how great your lessons are if your mind is in a toxic place. The energy we exude is the energy they absorb. Just writing that makes my heart hurt because I’ve had such negative energy lately. It’s easy to go there; easy to feel sorry for ourselves and to get stuck in a mindset of “I can’t feel happy because (insert your choice of unfortunate or less than ideal circumstance you find your life in).” The biggest problem with weeds is that they multiply so quickly, they can get out of control fast!
For me, it was going something like this…
I live with my mom. We don’t have enough bedrooms. My van is definitely not going to make it through the year and I don’t even have a penny saved for my next vehicle. I don’t even have a real bed of my own. I so wish my marriage would’ve worked out so I didn’t have to work so hard to make ends meet. This job is never ending stress! I wish I could just go back to retail and at least when I clocked out for the day, I could leave the work at work! I’m spread so thin I’m about to disappear… who am I kidding? The only thing disappearing around here is the stash of candy I’ve had to replenish a good 7 times in the last month. Well, that and my chances of ever finding love. I can’t believe I can’t even have a garden here…. children should have a garden. What am I doing trying to raise kids without a proper yard….. no tree house or any hope of ever having a treehouse? I wish I lived out in the country where I could have all of that… a real yard. If there’s a will there’s a way right? Well, I have a will to go out on my own. I have no idea the way but I’m going to find it. I’m going to go buy a $50,000 house and fix it up with some good old fashioned elbow grease and the knowledge I learn from You Tube videos. (Spends 2 hours on real estate websites seeing what I can get for $50,000) Then, I’ll furnish it with things I find on the side of the road or at thrift stores and grow all the vegetables I could possibly want in my homemade compost. I’ll adopt a pregnant cat and raise all the kittens on my little “farm” and get a couple Araucana chicks to raise so the kids can collect green eggs for breakfast. STOP!
Ok so let’s be real… I still am keeping some of those pipe dreams in my hope chest… I mean fixing up a house with your kids would be a pretty awesome learning opportunity and think of the memories we’d make together, but I digress. All the time and energy I wasted in those weeds lead to absolutely nothing productive. I just felt exhausted, dissatisfied, and depressed. Maybe one day I will be able to do some of those things but it’s definitely not today and the key to happiness is not hope that tomorrow will be better. It’s finding the beauty in today. So, I decided to take a few key points from my weedy journey and turn my inner dialogue into something a little more productive and a lot more healthy.
Bloom Where You’re Planted
- I want to grow a garden. I’ll try to find a community garden in town to join or ask family who lives nearby if we could use their yards to grow a few things.
- I don’t have a real bed. I’ll have to research my options. If people can live in tiny houses with real beds, surely I can figure out something here.
- My van isn’t going to make it through the year. I redid my budget so I could start saving $100 a month for my next vehicle and crossing my fingers that I’m wrong about the year thing.
- Most important of all, I made a list of what I do have that makes me appreciate my life as it is today. After all, perception, as they say, is reality.
- My kids are healthy and happy.
- We have a safe place to live.
- My mom is amazing and supportive.
- We have family right in town.
- There’s a park across the street.
- The art and music classes are nearby.
If I worked harder, I could’ve made the list longer but that was enough for me to get my focus back where it belonged. I immediately felt better, just by changing the way I looked at it all. If your inner dialogue is making you feel dissatisfied and drained in your life, try weeding. It’s amazing the impact our mindsets can have on our lives and the lives of our families. I’m sure I’ll have to continue weeding out those negative thoughts as the days progress…. probably about as often as I’d have to weed an actual garden…. but I will try to remember to bloom where I’m planted. I could probably use a reminder of this in about 3 days. 😉