Tending to the Garden of Your Life

There is no such thing as a person without struggles. The statistics on the prevalence of mental health challenges published from time to time speak of large percentages of people who will experience at least one episode of depression or another disorder in their lifetime.

This is without mentioning financial stress, parenting challenges, marital issues, and others. It’s clear, then, that anyone who comes into life without proper “survival gear” simply won’t make it. In my eyes, one of the most important tools for survival is personal growth. Stop fighting, keep growing, and the challenges will shrink in comparison!

A metaphor from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can be helpful to understand this:

Let’s say you decide to fulfill a dream and start a garden. You go outside, to a nearby empty plot, and you begin to plant. As soon as you finish, you look up and see that the land across the way is more fertile- anything planted there will grow faster and better. You tell yourself that you have no choice and you uproot everything and move it to that new plot. Again, once you finish replanting, you notice the land at the far end of the street is even better. It’s closer to water, easier to irrigate, simpler to plow and so once again, you move everything over there.

How often in life do we encounter difficulty, give up, and abandon the garden of our lives? We don’t realize that no plot of land in life is ever perfect. Challenges will always pop up and the question is, will I continue investing in this space? This is my wife, my husband, my children, my life. I can dream of another garden, but in the meantime, this garden is withering. If I’m not committed to my values, to the importance of cultivating this space, to the satisfaction that comes from clearing rocky soil with sweat and effort, any new garden will wither too.”

When I decide that no matter what, I will keep growing, this perspective shrinks the challenges and sends a message to myself that I’m not afraid of hardship. It tells my difficulties: “Yes, you’re real, and you hurt me sometimes- but you’re not a reason to abandon my life’s garden. I know the difference between a roadblock and my own power to keep moving.”

Every painful emotion is made up of the experience that triggered it, and our fear of feeling it. The more we resist negative emotions, the more they hurt. But if we understand that life must come with struggles and difficult feelings, and if we accept them (not passively, but from a place of inner strength), the pain will feel less threatening. We can continue to nurture the garden of our lives, even while “holding hands” with the pain along the way.

We must also remember why this garden matters to us in the first place. What values are we expressing in every moment of effort and care? We may dream of beautiful, fruitful trees in our garden, but every small act of cultivation we do contributes to the growth.

This approach transforms the experience of life into something meaningful and fulfilling, and gives us strength, satisfaction, and real success.