Weeds
Nothing quite captures your attention and draws you in to read a post as much as a picture of a weed, right?
I am counting on the fact that every reader of this blog has had a weed encounter of some type and is intrigued by the title.
I would love to have a salsa vegetable garden. I would love to have lovely perennials that bloom year round. I would adore having brightly colored flower patches filled with annuals. However, each of those things that I love involves pulling weeds - from time to time. As much as I love the thought of a salsa garden and lovely flowers, I dislike the thought of pulling weeds.
However, yesterday morning I hit a point of weed intoleration that had me choose to go out and deal with the problem. As I stood on my back deck looking at my backyard, I realized that in one corner of the yard, I could no longer actually see the flowering bushes - they were completely surrounded and infiltrated with weeds. I took a deep breath, quickly ran through my list of excuses for why I could not deal with the weeds .... and came up empty.
Armored with mosquito spray, long pants (even though it was 87 and super humid), short sleeves (a HUGE mistake), heavy canvas gloves and a bucket, I headed to the corner. I gave myself a timeline - 15 minutes - I would make whatever progress I could make in 15 minutes.
I do my best in any unsavory situation when I try to think of the lessons I can learn from it ... here is what got me through my 15 minutes!
#1. It takes a lot of effort to cultivate good things in our lives (teams, organizations, relationships) - while weeds take zero effort - they just show up on their own.
#2. Sometimes good things can look awfully similar to bad things UNTIL you look closely - just like weeds.
#3. No one else is very eager to pull your weeds - they are your weeds and you need to deal with them.
#4. I have to put up fences and use other products to protect the things I want to keep; the weeds that I don't want, no one else wants either.
#5. Sometimes it hurts to get rid of a "weed" in our life, but it's totally worth it.
thistles
What weeds are you sick of looking at and you just need to go in and PULL THEM?
