I'm not sure if you've been paying close attention but I recently thinned out the lettuce. Well, in fact, I only thinned out some of the lettuce, not because I've nailed balance in life but because the garden is only so big and there were no more empty rows to transplant to.
I hardly made a dent in thinning out the row.
I'm working on *time management* and *impulse control* so that I might experience the luxury of not being jammed up and constantly rushing. This means fighting my tendency to the all-or-nothing in planting, in scheduling and in basically every area of my life.
In the old days, I'd be on twitter for fifteen hours straight or packing so many different things into a day that the only possible outcome would be to be anxious, behind schedule by 10 AM and feeling (if not actually) inadequate.
With my new discipline, I make up a list of what I'd (unrealistically) like to accomplish today. (If you wanted a visual image of this list, look to the hedge of lettuce, above).
Next, with a cold heart, I put a star beside only what must get done today. An image for the starred jobs might be the heads of lettuce which I transplanted to another row. Usually it's only the starred things which get transferred to an 8 x 11 piece of paper and assigned to one or more thirty minute blocks. This is not an easy moment as the fraction of what I want to accomplish which makes it onto this schedule feels paltry, it feels like what I should knock off before lunch. But day after day, it's turning out to be pretty much all that I can actually accomplish in a day. I seem to remember that the recommended eighteen inches between heads of lettuce also seemed like a crazy waste of space.
I'm taking inspiration and hope from the example of the transplanted lettuce.
Look at the ones (on the right) which were transplanted out of the row and given enough room. And look at the poor little lettuce on the left (in my right hand) which is jammed up and still suffering from the gardener's 'too much ain't enough' mentality.
Both pictures were taken today. All lettuce was planted at the same time.