First You Plant Radishes

First, you plant radishes and pull weeds.

You start alone, with four planting beds, a broken down house and guest cottage, an empty chicken pen, and a whole lot of weeds, stumps, and rocks. Out back is a quarry and a woodlot.

Your goal is a renovated house and guest cottage, many more planting beds with orchards and vegetables in abundance, pens filled with chickens, geese, turkeys, black and white sheep, goats and cattle. In the end you hope to own a thriving business, with a truck stop, railway station, boat dock, sawmill, brick factory, canning factories, textile mills, dairies and bakeries. Your spouse and grandma and grandpa have arrived to help out.

But first, you plant radishes and pull weeds.

Start where you are, use what you have, and take one step at a time to a better future.

What holds true in the computer game Farm Up is surprisingly true in real life.

We can get overwhelmed with the mess. Income too low, expenses too high, the cupboard is filled with junk food that’s well past its expiration date, the basement and the living room and the office are filled with boxes of who-knows-what, and the mountain of dirty dishes wobbles and threatens to become an avalanche of pots and pans and broken plates with every footstep that passes.

So you eat out, and your waistline burgeons outward.

This is no hypothetical situation—it’s where I was just seven or eight short years ago.

I was hoping for a bit of magic.

A lottery win. A full time job. A fairy godmother.

Then I could afford to move into a bigger house, hire someone to sort through and organize my junk, pay off all my debts, and hire a personal trainer and a personal chef to help get my weight under control. Most importantly, I’d be able to hire someone to dust and vacuum and clean the cat litter and sort the garbage into the proper bins.

But I didn’t win the lottery, and my research has shown me that winning wouldn’t have done me any good. Most lottery winners end up right back where they were within seven years of winning. Many are worse off, because they’ve lost the support system that helped them when they were just barely getting by. Even people who earn lots of money don’t often keep hold of it—I’ve read that many professional football players declare bankruptcy within twelve years of retiring.

Winning the lottery doesn’t work for the same reason that crash diets and New Years’ resolutions don’t work.

The habits don’t change. The inner self doesn’t change. You can clean up the mess around the person, but unless the mess inside changes, the mess outside will reappear.

So you start where you are, and take it step-by-step, as I vowed to do seven years ago.

I started by taking out the garbage and doing the dishes. Little by little, my house became more peaceful. My financial situation improved. I started writing and painting and crafting again.

I have learned how to create lasting change in my life. Little by little, too, I have learned when to hire others or ask for help, and when I can go it alone.

I have a personal trainer, but I have become my own personal chef. My mom has moved in, and I have found ways for her to help out.

I don’t have the big business represented by the transportation hubs and the factories or even the vegetable gardens. Not yet. But they will come.

In the meantime, I have radishes to plant and weeds to pull.

Falling Off the Wagon, Getting Back on the Horse

I am, as usual, trying to make multiple changes in my life at once. To no one's surprise, I am not acheiving my goals fully in any one area. Hence the lack of blog posts for the last few days.

Other changes I'm trying to make right now:

1) I'm trying to lose weight. I've decided to take this verrrrry slowly, with the first step being that I will eat breakfast every day, and that most days it will be a healthy one. I'm finding this the easiest to keep, because now I have a "breakfast buddy." Every morning, Ally barges into my bedroom, all chipper, and tells me it's time to get up and have breakfast.

To my surprise, I'm usually ready to actually get up! Some mornings, we've had breakfast and gone for a walk, which is even better.

2) I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing every day. This is where the blog-a-thon was supposed to help. Except that one day, Blogger was down so I coulnd't blog. And the next day, we had this big concert and I was at the church from eight-thirty in the morning until eleven at night. And the next day I was too tired. And by the next day, it seemed pointless, since I'd already failed the challenge.

Except that it isn't pointless. In those two weeks of blogging every day, my followers increased four-fold (from two to eight...), and my readership also increased greatly.

So I know that it's worth the effort, and even if I miss a day or two, I need to get back on the horse and keep riding.

3) I'm trying to clean up my house. I thought Ally would be good here, and I'll admit, she has cleaned up the kitchen to the point where I can actually use it for cooking. However, she did that by dumping all the stuff that was in the kitchen that shouldn't have been there into the hallway, so now I have a mess in the hallway.

From which I learn that while having a partner can help you stay on the wagon (see #1 above), having the wrong partner can knock you off it. Furthermore, the right partner for one endeavour might not be the right partner for another endevour.

4) I'm thinking of starting a small business. After coming in second for yet another plum job (when there was only one plum to pick), I'm beginning to understand that my qualifications either aren't recent enough, or aren't exactly what employers are looking for with respect to the positions that interest me. It may well be that if I want to avoid asking, "Do you want fries with that?" for the rest of my working life, I'm going to have to pull up my sleeves and get to work for that lazy, good-for-nothing boss I see in the mirror every morning.

The good news is I have an idea that a) involves using equipment I already have or can borrow for a while, b) I can do, and c) I would truly enjoy. More later if I decide to go with it!

On to market research...