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Plant Seed, Pull Weed Nurturing the Garden of Your Life
By Geri Larkin
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2008 Geri Larkin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061349041

Chapter One

Casing the Landscape: Developing a Clear Intention

Most gardeners just start digging holes and stuffing things in (such as the fastest growing maples and poplars they can find) and are perfectly happy for about three years. Then it dawns on them that the garden does not excite them much, and this revelation usually occurs about the first time they see pictures of a fine garden constructed on other principles.
—Henry Mitchell, Small Gardens: The Big Picture

We can be happy. Right here. Right now. In fact, this seems to be the great cosmic prank. We look for happiness everywhere instead of right in front of us. The teacup I am holding in my hand, at first glance, is a small, plain, white, round, ceramic cup. But as I take time to really look, it has every color. Blues in the shadows. Some purple. Pink along the edges. Sparkling spots where the light directly hits it. And the tea, a green tea, ranges from a light gold to a deep caramel with shadows that constantly shift as though they were on a tiny dancing lake. It smells of the earth, tastes like the earth, and warms me to my toes on a cold fall morning. All this in a simple cup of tea. How can I not be happy?

Having my foot in a cast doesn't take away from the taste of the tea. In the same way, facing a pileup of bills won't erasethe sun shining through the front window or the musky smell of someone's fire in a fireplace. It has taken me a while to realize that the problems of our lives don't erase the nonproblem parts of our lives—the flowers, the trees, the stripes of light on a wall. These things always surround us, even in prison cells and basement apartments.

There is, however, a catch. (You knew this was coming.) To be happy, we first need to intend to be happy.

Maybe fifteen years ago, back in my hand-tailored-suit management-consultant days, my boss sent me to a daylong business conference at the local community college. Its theme was team building. At first I thought I was being punished since nobody else from the firm was asked to participate. By the end of the day I understood that he had given me a gift. It took a while for the magnitude of the gift to sink in. I'm like that.

The day does not start well. We are separated into groups of eight and told to sit at circular tables that have crayons on them. Groan. Double groan. Give me a handwritten excuse to get out of here now. Help me disappear. Anything but the crayons. I am at a table of men, mostly bankers and academics. When they see the crayons they look as frantic as I feel.

It gets worse.

At the center of each table is a huge pile of blank paper. Beside the piles are Magic Markers in every color. We are back in kindergarten.

We sit down, gingerly. Nobody speaks. We don't even look at each other.

The first speaker of the day is a young energetic man from the Ford Motor Company. One of their up-and-comers. He starts raving about some management consultant, Peter Senge, from Boston. I'm already thinking, "Not another management consultant with a quick fix. Kill me now." But because I'm too chicken to get up in front of everyone else, and I don't want to let my crayon-sharing team down, I stay through the rest of the rave. Senge, he tells us, has woven together a formula for helping companies to function better.

I don't know about the other tables. At mine, we are still looking down. Eye contact might set off laughter. We have heard this promise too many times.

The place to start is with intentions, he tells us. Our own. By this time the young fellow is running around the room because he can't keep his excitement in one place. "Where is my camera?" I think. I want this on film for the days when I can't get started. Just watching him is making us all smile. He is contagious.

We are instructed to take a piece of blank paper and to either list or sketch where we intend to be in ten years. We are to include our homes, the climate, the geography, our livelihood. The people we will be surrounded by. To keep us going, the day's organizers have put M&M's, cauldrons of coffee, and cases of Diet Coke within reach.

We have forty-five minutes. Since I've always loved crayons, I make sketches and write vivid descriptions of everything that will be in my life ten years out. My tablemates write their intentions as outlines. Each theme has subcategories, and each subcategory has measurable accomplishments. They must have gone to the same business school. Their outlines look identical when I try to read them, uninvited, upside down. The room is quiet while we concentrate. After a while the facilitator starts talking again. The only thing we have to do to get from where we are to what we have described, he tells us, is to set clear intentions. In other words, we have to decide we really want what we have already written down. Then every time we have to make a choice related to these intentions, we simply make the one that gets us closer to it. Feed the images we've drawn in our minds. It is that simple. Companies are the same, he says, and proceeds to share Senge case studies of how clear intentions, acted out, have changed companies for the better.

Listening, I am not convinced, although the exercise was fun and the case studies are interesting. Too many other variables could have affected the companies' shifts. I shove the sketches into a book I have with me and promptly forget about them until ten years later when, in a flurry of energy, I decide to give away all of my books. Okay, not all of them. All but one bookshelf worth, which quickly becomes one bookcase worth, but at least I can walk through the living room again.

Excerpted from Plant Seed, Pull Weed by Geri Larkin Copyright © 2008 by Geri Larkin. Excerpted by permission.
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