Fresh Eyes

It’s another rainy day here today, but in anticipation of the long-awaited spring, Magnolia and I spent a couple hours this weekend enjoying the intermittent sunshine and setting up our irrigation hoses. Granted, the rain will continue for the next few months, but once it stops, it’s done until October. I learned early on that it’s easier to plant seeds around hoses than it is to bend hoses around plants. It’s usually fairly miserable work, done in the rain and very specifically keeping me from what I really want to do - putting seeds in the ground already!

Our hoses are a bit frou-frou, the kind of complicated thing you get when you have more time than land. It has all these connectors and it really does work very well to keep the water where I want it and away from the paths and beds that don’t need it. But it can also be a bit costly, so I’ve added pieces to it year over year, until now I have enough to water the whole thing properly.

While we were working, I was sort of laying the hoses where I wanted them and Magnolia was securing them down and connecting everything. With her intelligent and curious mind, she rearranged a few to make a different configuration than the way I’d always done it. I looked down at what she'd done, ready to correct her, paused, and realized that her new way was easier and made more sense than the way I’d always done it. In half an hour, not only had she helped me significantly with the grunt work, but her fresh eyes had seen something I couldn’t.

Because the way I’d always done it had been borne out of scarcity, a time when I was trying to stretch my first purchases as far as I possibly could. At first, I didn’t have enough hose to truly cover the whole garden, choosing instead to try to make it work and water by hand what I couldn’t reach. But now that I have what I truly need, there’s no reason to make things topsy-turvy just to maximize the feet covered by each hose.

There’s a metaphor there, if we can see it. How many of our habits made total sense in an earlier life stage? How many behaviors were adaptive once, but now make life unnecessarily complicated? How much time are we wasting instead of looking at how we’re living to see what needs to change?

I think this last year has shaken up a lot of our preconceptions about how life has to work. I think, more than that, it has shaken up our ideas of what we can rely on. At least for the parents I know, the fantasy of general social support for raising children is gone - this idea that there are grandparents, friends, childcare workers and teachers who can help us with the impossible juggle of modern life and modern parenting. It is with no small bitterness that we realized that when it all came down to it, we were on our own. Which means that that impossible juggle of modern life and modern parenting? It can’t continue. Something has had to give. For many of us, it’s the idea of good parenting. Those criticisms of screen time that we once worried over - laughable now. For many of us, it’s the demands of modern life. People (mothers, mostly) have had to leave jobs in droves. I don’t know what the long term result of that will be, but I know that few parents are leaving this time unaffected.

How does life work when we know that the safety nets we thought were there aren’t? How do we rearrange our hoses to take into account a new reality? I don’t think it has to be bad. Maybe we leave this time realizing that those safety nets are really, really important. Maybe we figure out that in an interconnected world, our health literally depends on the health of the sickest country. Maybe we admit that asking for greater and greater productivity from workers without commensurate compensation is both unjust and unwise.

I hope we do. I hope that in the next few months, we throw a big, big party. And then we get to work using our fresh eyes to rearrange those hoses.