I don’t have a green thumb, but I’ve recently discovered the vitality to tending my inner garden.
In Arianna Huffington’s book “Thrive,” she talks about a third less-known metric by which to measure your life.
Most people equate success to money and power, but Huffington dishes out a third: self-care.
Many may see this as a rich people’s privilege, much like the New York Times recently running a piece on coping with life in your summer home full-time.
It sounds like a rough situation when millions of people across the country are without jobs or health insurance.
But self-care isn’t elitist.
There’s many plants in your inner garden: mental health, physical health, financial health, and relationship health, and career health.
You need the fruits of all of these herbs in the future.
It doesn’t mean much to be financially wealthy if you can’t physically get off the couch to visit another country.
Marriage to your best friend could spiral into a nightmare if constantly harassed by debt collectors.
Mental and relationship health are tightly wound since humans are social animals.
You can care for your garden in multiple ways, but the difficult part is that you don’t see immediate payoffs.
It can take months to tell if a seed is sprouting, decades to see a 401(k) augment, and six months to recognize diet and workout gains.
In 2020, people aren’t accustomed to delayed gratification. We want everything now.
This leads to a shallow society that values appearances more than reality. You spend time perfecting style but neglect to eat healthily and exercise.
The solution to delayed gratification is to engrain healthy habits.
We make thousands of choices every day, so habits code us on auto-pilot to save mental energy for decisions that matter.
This is why Steve Jobs owned hundreds of identical black turtlenecks so he could burn energy on more crucial decisions.
But habits can help or hurt. We could hit the gym every other day, or default to binge-drinking every Friday and Saturday night simply because we don’t know what else to do.
Most of the time spent cultivating your garden are hours alone (or with a significant other.)
These are hours that fight for attention among hundreds of distractions, from Netflix to watching people’s day-to-day lives on social media stories.
But you are your own best investment.
So you should unplug from exterior distractions and continually tend to your inner garden.