A New Garden

Imagine if you had a garden that gave you all sorts of good things to eat.  You could grow zucchini, cucumbers, celery, lettuce, but for whatever reason, you couldn’t grow tomatoes.  Year after year, you try, you work hard at it but the result of your effort is always the same – little to no tomatoes.  Because you can perceive your garden from the rest of the world, at some point, you’d recognize that what’s lacking in your life – tomatoes – is not to be found in your garden.  You could continue to stubbornly work hard to grow tomatoes in your garden, or you could move on.

If you look around at the world, there are many things that are lacking for people.  For some, it’s adequate food and shelter.  For others, it’s peace and safety.  For others, it’s an overall experience of joy and fulfillment.  And yes, there are some, who don’t experience anything missing from their lives.  Mostly, we have just accepted this state of affairs – how it is – as a fact of life.  The result is we continue to work hard to combat the things we don’t like or search for the things that are missing from our lives.  Never does it seem to cross our minds that we are looking for these things in a garden where they just won’t grow.

Now this may seem rather cynical if you think that the garden I’m talking about is life itself.  Before we leap to the conclusion that life is the culprit, there’s another question to consider and that is, “What if it’s not life that is creating the experience we’re having, instead it’s our way of life?”  Here I’m not talking about the way of life in America or in China or in India.  I’m talking about all of it – a way of life on this planet.  If we can begin to recognize that there is a way of life – a holistic system – we’ve created that is giving us what we have, then we begin to ask questions like, “How do we design a new way of life to give us the things we are looking for?  How can we design a new garden to give us all the things we already have plus the thing we want – tomatoes?”  Or as I ask it in my book A Life Worth Living, “How do we design a way of life where good things happen naturally for people?”

We’ve spent our lives trying to get our “garden” to grow the things we want.  It’s time to at least consider the possibility that the way of life we’ve created is simply not designed to give us everything we want.  This doesn’t mean we have to trash what we have nor does it make how we’ve lived wrong.  There is no right or wrong in this question.  There never is in the realm of design.  There’s just “what is” – the results we have.  The question isn’t whether what we have is right or wrong; the question is whether what we have is what we want.

And if the challenge of inventing a new way of life seems daunting especially when you look out at all that we’ve already created in the world, just remember that creation begins in thought not in physical space.  The place where you need to make space for your creation is not out here in the world, it’s in your mind.  You don’t need to run off into the wilderness to find a new way of life.  You don’t need to spend your life convincing others to join you in your creation.  The light bulb existed in Edison’s mind before it ever existed in physical reality, and he created it without seeking permission or agreement from anyone else.  All you need to do is make space for a new question, a new inquiry, something like “How do we design a new way of life where good things happen naturally for people?”  

All you need to do to begin is to make space for a new conversation.