In a presentation not long ago, I posed the question, “How does your garden grow?” This was a metaphorical question posed to engage the audience into truly questioning the root – no pun intended – of what it takes to grow and produce the meaning and purpose we all want out of our lives, relationships, and businesses.
The session concluded with a simple thought….the gardener must garden.
The Gardener’s Garden sparked some more thoughts here.
As long as you have questions, you’ll be on the path of fulfillment. Questions keep us child-like.
The more I’m with my children the more I’m enthralled and longing to be recruited into their classes they are unknowingly teaching. “Why?”, “Can I color?”, and “Where’s the rainbow?” are the questions they’re wrestling with now.
If we are honest, we’re still asking the same questions as well.
May we never lose the courage to ask.
For most of us, the lion isn’t chasing us in the jungle anymore. So why all the stress and all of the books and discussion of how to tame it?
It appears that in world over-served with the noise of “must-have” toys, experiences, and trinkets, we can’t seem to focus long enough to truly understand what we want out of our lives, relationships, and businesses. In other words, the buffet of choice, with everything item screaming for us to ‘like it’, is stressing us out.
I’ve learned that the calm ones are the focused ones…and the focused ones get what they want (and what we truly want too). They get a life that means something and one that is lived with purpose. They work hard, sleep well, and have a peace that paves the way for focus.
Here’s 5 Ways to Keep Calm…so you can focus and tend to your gardens of life.
1) Gratitude Awareness: This isn’t about things. This is about health, well-being, and opportunity to see, take in, partake, and experience your role in the story unfolding.
2) More and More of Less and Less: In the end, you can hardly recall a test you failed, a breakup, or something else disturbing that happens to you just 90 days down the road. Fewer things of importance leads to fewer things to stress about. Realize what makes you tick and stay near such things. This goes for all things in life.
3) Sleep: Studies are showing the #1 place we can all use a tune up is in the sleep department. DVR Fallon if it’s that important to you.
4) Avoid Thoughts of your “Future Self”: Plan, invest, and sow wisely, but don’t let tomorrow cause you to miss out on the beauty to behold today.
5) Reflect: You won’t believe what the mirror wants to tell you if you’re willing to look and listen to it for a while. Click here and check out Headspace.
Final thought…try to make focus a noun, not a verb in the days ahead. You’d rather have it than do it.
…the lesson(s) being taught are irrelevant.
Life constantly teaches us with ups and downs, sunrises and sunsets, waves crashing in and waves pulling out, shooting stars and those hung frozen in the cosmos and there is no pass or fail test. Only two requirements: look and listen.
Ask for openness. Whimsy swirls in fresh air.
Ask to be sponge-like. Soak it in.
Ask for availability. Open > Closed.
Ask, and it will be given to you.
At all costs, be a friend.
We need this more than any other label you can earn, learn, choose, or become.
“Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .” C.S. Lewis
Ashton.Gustafson 
