A Second Look Revisit

As a housewarming gift, a friend brought me several mammoth sunflower plants he had started from seed. This was a much appreciated gift as I love sunflowers. The only problem was we didn't have a ready made place to plant them. All of the existing beds were either full or didn't get enough sun for the sunflowers to thrive. We decided to clear a strip in front of a fence leading to the backyard to plant them.

If all goes well, these sunflowers will grow 10' tall.

This should have been an easy job as we were only clearing a 2' x 12' patch, but it didn't seem that way to me while we were working. Ward and I worked together for at least two hours to clear the sod and break up the dirt. That was grueling because the sun was really intense that day, something the sunflowers would appreciate later, but something I didn't appreciate then. However, by the end, we had a nice bed all ready to pop the plants into.

I tackled planting the next morning. And once again what I thought should have been an easy job, took much longer than expected. By the time I gathered my tools, raked in fertilizer, cleaned a few more rocks and weeds out of the bed, it took me almost an hour to plant 5 plants. Ridiculous, I thought! I'm glad I don't do this for a living because I was so slow.

I fretted for a while about my lack of productivity, but then tried to shift my negative thinking. My attitude was ruining the time I usually enjoyed outdoors. I decided to reexamine the sunflower experience. First I thought about how I enjoyed talking with Ward as we shook the dirt off the sod. Next I thought about how I really did like combing through the dirt making piles of rocks I thought were interesting, separating out the grubs. making sure that all of the earthworms were returned to the soil, and breaking up any remaining clods we had missed. The process had been time consuming but interesting to me. So when I didn't worry about how much time it took to plant five plants, I realized that the whole thing had actually been an enjoyable experience.

There are plenty of times when I need to be efficient and accomplish tasks in a timely manner. But not always. Sometimes I need to slow down, enjoy the process, and appreciate what is around me. Just like I try to do in my Second Looks. However, somewhere along the way of working on our new house, I had forgotten about this. It's time to go back to my roots. Time to explore my yard and look past the work that is calling me and to see things with a different set of eyes. 

Here's the original post that inspired my Second Looks  Now let's see if I can remember it next time I go outside.