Today I wandered around the garden appreciating the burgeoning springiness of it all. I spent a good hour just being thoroughly bemused by... like... plants and shit.
And there was literally shit: we got some great 50/50 from the local topsoil place, and it has been growing nutty morels in the shade and what are becoming shockingly large rose bushes in the sun. And it was great.
Gardening is a weird hobby. I've heard it described as "slow-motion art." Nothing happens right away; plans you laid a year, two years ago, take shape and turn into slow, unfolding, gently changing living sculpture.
And I can happily spend hours just wandering around the garden thinking, and planning; imagining vaguely what might work where, and doing random undirected poking. Pick a weed, pull some dead stuff, prune a thing, tie back a drooper, relocate a flagstone, dig a hole... all in a bemused fugue state that is both relaxing and weirdly exhausting.
The great thing about a garden is that plants don't mind. They are slow. They like my unfocussed futzing, just a bit here and a bit there -- eventually all the small inputs add up. Nothing is ever urgent, though everything has a season. But as long as my random walks are random enough, I can get enough done to keep things growing.
And that's kinda how I've directed my life, too. I've been able to build an incredible career out of being a generalist. I bury myself in shit until I have enough raw fertilizer for my brain, and then once things start happening, I randomly tend my thought-gardens until good things grow. (And the occasional weed.)
It's felt like this winter I've been buried by a haze of meetings; this week I got to spend some solid hours making progress on focus tasks that I've been planning for ages. And, like all things spring lying dormant in the ground, all it really took was a bit of poking and fussing; suddenly things once dormant are shouldering their way out, shrugging off the dirt, and threatening to bloom.