Look Back

The garden is a great place for life lessons: delayed gratification, stick-to-it-iveness, hard work. Gardeners are, by nature, future-minded: thinking ahead to the next week, the next season, the next years, believing that hard work now will yield fruit and beauty in the future. Sometimes it is hard to pause and take stock, to look around and appreciate everything that's been accomplished and how far you've come. Instead, we make mental to-do lists of undone tasks and notes about what to do better next time.

But, we all know how important it is to celebrate milestones, to appreciate work well done, to say "congratulations" to others or even to yourself.  Sometimes life, like work in the garden, just keeps rolling along into the next season without a natural stopping point to mark a transition. When you are working hard - at life or in the garden - perhaps pulling weeds down a row of tiny seedlings, and maybe everything starts to get caked in dirt and sweat runs down into your eyes and your hat keeps blowing off and the end of the row never seems to get any closer... don't forget to take a pause and look over your shoulder. Take in what you've done already, how beautiful and neat it is, marvel at how far you've come and what your hard work has accomplished. Take heart, be encouraged. Your work is making a difference.