I get nervous before every rapid in the river.  The little voice kicks in, “am I good enough? Do I possess the right skills to safely and competently descend this?” The same is true at the bottom of every mountain: “am I in good enough shape to ascend this?”  This same questioning voice enters the fray before any big leap of change.

​Many of you know that I am working toward stepping back from the farm a bit to pursue a writing “side hustle.”  Working only part time earlier this year, and fancying myself a writer, I subscribed to “Poets & Writers” magazine and “The New Yorker” (did you know that comes weekly!!??).   As I work through the piles of print, not to mention my “to-be-read pile” that somehow continues to grow taller, I find lists of degrees and accolades, previously published books, teaching positions, etc. beneath the authors’ names.  The questioning voice notices the blank space that follows my name.

As I ponder this leap from the known to the completely unknown, the question, “am I good enough?” pervades my work.  But today, I decided to look to my oft-used metaphor of whitewater kayaking.  When I am nervous about a challenging rapid, I ask another question before I decide whether or not to run it, “what are the consequences if I fail?” Are they worth the risk?  Nearly always, the answer is yes.  Failure is rarely dangerous to anything more than ego.

And so it is with most leaps in life.  From today on, I’m going to look at the potential consequences, and thumb my nose at the questioning voice, say, “I don’t care if I’m not good enough (yet), I won’t ever get better if I don’t try!” and take the leap.

So, you’ll still hear from me here, and see me at occasional markets, but by the end of the year, I’m going to shift to working mostly behind the scenes at Tumbling Shoals Farm.  Don’t worry, I’m handing the reins over to extremely competent hands and I’ll be behind them supporting them the whole time.

Last week I made a lot of time.  I never realized I could do that: make time.  I thought it would require much more magic than I thought possible of my mere mortal self.  It turns out, though, that “making time” is actually more of a shuffling of priorities than true magic (depending on your perspective). You shift a few things around, decide what tasks can actually wait for another time and voila! You’ve made time.

​All that making of time is exhausting!  I arrived at Monday thinking, “whew! It’s been a long week!” before I realized it was, in fact, the first or second day of the week depending on your calendar settings.  So today, I made some more time.  I stood above the cauldron and stirred, whispered some magic sounding words, neglected the records I still had yet to enter for the last two weeks (a victim of all that making of time) and poof! I made some time to can tomatoes before it was too late.  

Tonight, I think I’ll sacrifice the vacuuming to make time to visit our neighbor.  The more time I make, the easier the making of time seems.  I guess magic is like anything else: it takes practice.  Let me go wave my magic wand around in the name of practice.

It rained.  Not as much here as we had expected, but still, we were checking all the gauges, paddles at the ready.  But then it seemed clear that none of the local rivers were up quite enough and we started doing other things-work things.  It was a Friday, after all, a harvest day before Saturday markets.
But then I get the call, 10:30 a.m.  We can paddle Wilson’s Creek Gorge (one of my all-time favorites) with my favorite paddler, Roger.  I hesitate. It feels crazy. I did vow never to turn down an opportunity to paddle with Roger, AND it’s Wilson Creek, but it’s FRIDAY! It’s unreasonable.  It’s insane.  I know I have the most competent excellent crew in our farm history, but STILL it feels crazy to let go and play hooky on a Friday.

​Then I remember the lesson I learned from Chip and Dan Heath, “never underestimate the soul-sucking force of reasonableness.”  And then, I remember my own philosophy developed, in no small part, from that same lesson: “Just say yes”.

So, after repeating those mantras seventeen times, I said yes.  And we headed off to play on the river in one of the most beautiful places I’ve been.  And, of course, we left there with our wide grins, riding high and fully energized for the work that lay ahead of us too early the next morning. 

These are lessons I’ve learned over and over again, yet still I can’t help but hesitate in the face of a decision between play and work.  It’s years of training and work ethic, but those are the things that have gotten us to the place where we can choose play over work occasionally.  And so, my friends, in case you, too, could benefit from a little shift in your universe, I shall quote Chip and Dan Heath once again, “Never underestimate the soul-sucking force of reasonableness.”

Do you ever stop to think about what exactly it is that you value?  I mean really dive deep into what makes you tick.  It’s easier than one might imagine to lose track of these things in the slog of daily life. It takes a step back, a slowdown, an arresting of the madness for just a moment to safely examine what moves us.  And then, once you’ve put your finger on that wriggling caterpillar of motive, to step back again and determine if your activities are actively pursuing those values.

​I was reminded recently of one my own core values that my recent delving into more serious matters has me forgoing.  That is the value of humor.  I love to laugh.  But I have not been honoring that value of late. And all it took was a movie to shake me out of austere torpor.  Yes, that’s right. Deadpool, once again, has reached his unlikely hero’s hand down to me and lifted me back into a levity I had forgotten to miss. 

Now that I have been reminded of the value of not taking myself too seriously, I will not entirely abandon the responsibility of the more serious delving, but also continue to reach for the ballast of joy.  Of levity.  It is not my intention to stomp so heavily upon the earth that my path descends downward into the darkness, but rather to step lightly and lithely onto the clouds, lifting others up with mirth instead of dragging them down with gravity.

As I am not immune to gravity myself, sometimes I need a hero’s hand.

​

Many moons ago, when I was in college, my friend Kevin and I decided to go to the County Fair.  We ate junk food, rode rides, played some carnival games, and laughed a lot.  Turns out, for reasons I cannot recall, Kevin had a gift certificate (??) for a free palm reading with a psychic who had a booth at the fair.  He didn’t want to use it, but I wanted to continue the fun and so I went in to see her.  She set the mood with her beads and crystals and deep smokey voice.  She asked me if I had any burning questions. My reply was meant to catch her off guard, which, as you might have predicted, is difficult to do to a psychic, and was evidenced by her smooth reply, “you just need balance in your life.”

​“But-“I protested, still wanting to throw her off her performance

“-Balance.” She cut me off (She was good!)

Well, as generic predictions and advice tend to do, this has become a theme in my life and a reason I even remember this non-event meant just for fun so long ago.  You see, it wasn’t until several years later, after Jason and I had wandered into each other’s lives and seemed to have stuck, that I learned that Jason’s Appalachian Trail name is (did you guess it?): Balance. (insert audible “aaawww” here)

But that was not to be the end of this generic prediction, oh no!  This comes around in varying frequencies.  In middle age, the balance challenge has been between living for today since no one is guaranteed tomorrow, and planning for tomorrow in case you get to have one.  In a physical labor career, I don’t think I can work until I’m 85, so I had better make at lease some allocation for tomorrow just in case I get there.  I don’t have it perfected, by any means, but this has been the balance occupation of the last several years.

Then, enter election cycle as they are wont to do.  And so, for the rest of the year, I must struggle to obtain the balance between sanity (no news is good news!), and staying engaged enough to make informed decisions in a few months. This balance challenge is a doozy!  It feels a bit like walking a tight rope over the precipice of doom and I wobble a lot.  Hopefully, my harnesses of joy and human connection can keep me from falling into that deep dark pit of despair, but I had better reinforce them when I can in case I lose my balance I’ve been seeking since I walked out of that carnival tent all those years ago.

When you get behind and begin the triage, (which always seems to happen in June/July on the farm) you start to ignore the periphery.  But the periphery, like a child building a sand castle,  grows over time until eventually it’s so impressed with itself that it starts to stomp around and scream “look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” And you can no longer blind yourself to it.

​The recycling begins to overflow.  The collapsed shelf begins to hinder the obtainment of supplies. The trailer of trash is towering. The piles of piles taunt you to near insanity. It is then that you re-prioritize the periphery to the forefront. You clean up your space a bit; take care of those little things that have been quietly nagging at you even though none of them appear to help you earn your living. Because sometimes, sanity becomes the priority. And when it does, it turns out that sanity does help you make your living.

At least it throws some semblance of organization to the chaos.  Which can be exactly how farm life feels in July.  Like you keep waking up to yet another Friday harvest day before that “stupid o’clock alarm” for Saturday markets.  Like it’s groundhog day but every Friday is a little bit different, you just don’t remember how you got to yet another Friday so quickly.  No matter how many times you just put one foot in front of the other with your head down, the weeds always move faster. Everything always moves faster. And the periphery is building again and you know it but you just can’t look at it yet.  Not until you get a little bit closer to insanity. Then you’ll re-prioritize again.

No matter your news source, the news is bad.  Really, news is inherently bad.  I mean, what’s newsworthy of nothing happened today?  That’s just the nature of the news beast.  But that doesn’t mean we as individuals, can’t inspect the cracks for levity and joy.

​In fact, I propose that it is our duty to do so.  We must maintain a side hustle in delight.  To fail to do so is  to besmirch our own human capacity for mirth.  It is to play the victim.  It is to wallow.  Don’t get me wrong:  I myself, have dabbled a bit in these dark acts.  It is rather easy to find oneself on that well-worn path of despair.  It is for this exact reason that we must accept the assignment of joy.  This is no small mission, my friends, but I know we are up to the task.

It requires concentration and effort and seeking.  You might, at first, sweat and grunt with the work of it, bowing under the weight of the impossibility of this mission.  But find that first delight (a child’s giggle, a bird’s morning tune, a gurgling creek, a snapdragon in the crack of a sidewalk, the relief of a cloud on a hot day), and the second becomes a slight bit easier to find.  Until, suddenly, you find yourself skipping amongst the clouds, enveloped in joy.

This is not to say that we should ignore the problems of the world around us. No, this is distinctly our side hustle.  But it is precisely this side hustle that better arms us to tackle the problems of the world around us. Without joy, we only exacerbate the problems.  We only throw more darkness on the despair with our useless complaints because without delight, what exactly is worth saving?  What is worth repairing? 

So soldier on, my comrades in arms against despair.  Let us find our joy and then fight to preserve it. Once we find our own, we will spread this contagion to the rest of the world and our levity will better lift those imposing boulders of darkness that pin our brethren down.

If every season must have a disaster, then we have arrived at this season’s disaster.  While we were all away working farmers markets on Saturday, we had a day long power outage that ceased the operation of the tomato/cucumber greenhouse ventilation during a heat wave.  The greenhouse proceeded to heat up to 140 degrees, which, as it turns out, is simply too hot for tomatoes and cucumbers.

I’ve surveyed the wasteland.  It’s a total loss.  “Well,” Jason says with a shrug of his shoulder, “that’s twenty five hours of labor we get to spend on other things.” I let the loss wash over me.  I double over with it.  I’m not ready for the silver lining yet.  It’s been a rough week full of complicated and intense human psychology and emotion that I found myself to be unprepared and unqualified to handle.  This, though, this is farming.  This is my familiar.  Disaster. Scrambling. Recovery.  Twenty years and we’re somehow still kicking this same dirt around.  Okay.  I shrug my shoulders.  Bring me the silver lining now.

​It's there, of course.  It always is.  But sometimes it takes a little digging through the rubble to get to it.  So after I picked myself up from the sucker punch and dusted myself off, I could see that Jason was right: the field tomatoes and cucumbers will get all the love they need now, we’ll catch up on things we never imagined getting to, and, perhaps, we even manage to kill any disease or insect build up in that greenhouse to better future production.  See?  I can do it too!  I’m not saying this isn’t going to hurt for a long time, but, if you look hard enough, you can start to see the little sparkle of silver amongst the wreckage.

Sometimes the rest of the world, or at least certain people in it, can feel very far away from things we understand.  A friend told me the other day that they have started with the very basic commonalities in others such as, “we’ve all got hair!”

​I remembered this the other day while standing in line at the bank on a Monday afternoon, observing all of our costumes.  Mondays at the bank are interesting in this way: we all wear our occupations, um, “on our sleeves” so to speak.  There was the man in front of me in a crisp white shirt and black dress slacks, and the woman in front of in front of him in her comfy supportive shoes and food service apron still clinging to her waist.  There was the woman in scrubs and orthopedic shoes, and the man with his mechanic’s coveralls embroidered with the name of the shop, and there was me in dirty jeans and work boots.

There we were, from all sorts of different occupations (and perhaps walks of life), with this mundane task in common.  We all need to go to the bank (assuming we don’t just stick cash in a mattress).  I didn’t know any of these people standing in line with me at the bank, but I knew, at the very basic level, that we all had this one thing in common: we needed to go to the bank.  And even that can be a starting point of connection in a world that can feel so far away.

​There is an old Ani DiFranco song lyric: “the butter melts out of habit, the toast isn’t even warm”, that’s been playing on repeat in my head since last Wednesday.  Wednesdays are one of the wake-up-at-stupid-o’clock-go-go-go long days that begin early and end late.  And I am rarely the best iteration of myself on those mornings, at least pre-coffee.  But I’ve been practicing.  Not practicing the wake-up-at-stupid-o’clock so much (I try to avoid that as much as possible), but practicing training my brain.

​I heard someone put it this way the other day: our thoughts/reactions are like water wearing a path through the limestone-they create easy pathways for automatic reactions, for habits.  But we can build a dam in those pathways and force the water to forge an alternate path.  This is what I’ve been practicing. And Wednesday, I noticed the practice paying off (which is good because I can get lazy about practice, just ask my mom about those seven years of piano lessons).

I gathered all my supplies for the long day, including my travel mug full of hot coffee.  As I was headed out the door, I noticed my back feeling very warm and realized that the travel mug lid was open and almost all the coffee had spilled out in my bag. The automatic “woe-is-me, this is how this day is going to go” reaction kicked in followed by Jason’s “let me take care of it” reaction, but I noticed my heart just really wasn’t in it.  The alternate route for the water was forged just enough so that not all of the water was running through the “woe-is-me” route.  Just enough so that even though my body was acting out of habit (big sigh), underneath that auto-pilot reaction, it just didn’t feel like that big of a deal.  Which it wasn’t, of course, but that hasn’t historically stopped me from acting like it was—like the world was somehow out to get me as evidenced by this early morning coffee spill.
This is the beauty of middle age.  I’ll never understand the obsession with youth in this culture.  I find the most joy in middle age, when I’ve had time and experience enough to learn that I have control over my own experience.  Perhaps some folks find this enlightenment earlier in life, but I was not one of those people.  And so I find myself enjoying middle age immensely, and only looking forward to the next phase, where I suspect even more joy awaits.