Working Out(side)

For my entire life I've despised yard work of any kind. Raking leaves, weeding, mowing, pruning. I hated everything about it.

This is no longer true. I have succumbed to the pleasures of working outside.

Plucking weeds and propping up the pepper plants growing in my garden is my new Friday night activity, the one thing I look forward to most at the end of the work week.Where I once watched HBO dramas and played video games, I now watch out for cabbage maggots, cutworms and aphids. Kneeling in dirt with fistfuls of manure has become meditation for me.

What's so fun about hauling dirt in an old wheelbarrow I found in the shed? The answer is everything, from fixing the broken tire axle before I could use it to the scrape of the shovel on its rusted metal inside as I scooped the dirt and spread it around.

Why, at the age of 43, did I suddenly start enjoying this sort of thing? One theory is the winter of 2013 was so brutally long that I have since gained a new appreciation for the nice weather. But I've already got my fall and winter plantings scheduled and I know that by, say late-August, I'll be looking forward to the cold once again. So it's definitely not a warm weather thing.

Could it be that I'm starting to lose brain cells and therefore seemingly mindless activities now attract my attention? No, no. Gardening is as complicated and rigorous a mental activity as you want it to be. There are planting charts to consult and structures to build, and pests to outsmart. Plus I do a lot of deep thinking out in my backyard, much more than I did watching reruns of Seinfeld.

In her blog post "The Science of How Your Mind-Wandering Is Robbing You of Happiness", Maria Popova explains how "people are less happy when they're mind-wandering, no matter what they're doing." I wonder what this means for activities like gardening. Am I being mindful when I'm ripping chunks of weed roots from the ground and shaking the loose dirt over my parsley stalks? Or am I thinking about something else, like what are my goals for the second half of my life? It's hard to know if this is being mindful or if this is mind-wandering.

I think I'll ponder this while I build a chicken-wire structure for my blueberry bushes to latch onto.