Tree Planting Reflections: Part Two

There are times in life when everything is stripped down to its bare essentials.  Success and happiness rely on our casting off of superfluous, unnecessary, thoughts and activities.  It’s amazing how many of these things we can accumulate over time.  A comfortable lifestyle breeds unnecessary activities and thought patterns.  I was looking back at a journal I kept during the planting season in 2011 and found this written at the top:

When it is time to plant, plant
When it is time to eat, eat
When it is time to sleep, sleep

The time will pass as quickly when it rains as when it snows as when it is sunny and warm

Do not think about tomorrow for tomorrow does not yet exist

The goal is money.

Everything else is a bonus.

Single-mindedness. 

Every year we would have a t-shirt design contest. Planters were encouraged to come up with and send in their artwork for the shirts given away at the end of each season.  Typically, one would be an artistic design of the company name and one would be a funny take on some inside planting joke.  Its telling that the inside joke would almost always be based in a deeper piece of tree planting wisdom.  “You are not the fastest human” riffs on the annual bear aware video.  Wisdom that permeates life will often find its way into humour.  The one I liked was “Eat, plant, sleep repeat”.  Single-mindedness will propel you towards your goal. 

Think of the worst experience that you have lived through.  Do you count this experience a blessing or a curse?  I cannot speak for all people and all situations, but I would argue that even your worst life experience can be a blessing. 

Tree planting allows you to put yourself in a situation where you will potentially suffer beyond anything you have known up to that point.  At the physical level alone, few will have felt the prolonged cold, wet, heat, torment from bug bites, and bodily pain that accompany the job.  The opportunity for emotional anguish as a result from the physical can be hell.  Let me paint you a picture of just one of many such days. 

During the last year I went up north there was a day on which I was behind in my work.  I was stressed about getting things finished and I was missing my wife, who I had left home for the summer, more than usual.  The job I was working at the time required me to work in isolation for the majority of the day.  It was about 30 degrees out and the black flies were at their peak so I couldn't dress adequately in a way that kept the bugs off and prevented me from overheating.  I also had a sore hip from a fall I had taken recently that kept me from moving freely and quickly.  It being my fifth year in the bush, I had become pretty good at pushing through pain of all kinds but the accumulation of all these factors snapped something and I ended up sitting on a tree stump, probably 100km away from the next human being, hyperventilating and sobbing, in a swarm of black flies crawling in through my clothes at every crevasse.

It’s an embarrassing story for me to tell but I think it communicates at least part of the stress involved.  So how in the world can that experience be a blessing?  For one thing it didn't last that long.  I managed to give myself a pep talk and get the job done.  Most importantly I will remember that day forever.  It is one of my benchmarks for suffering.  Every experience I have had since then has been compared to it. Until I go through something worse, everything will be manageable in comparison.

What is your benchmark?  

Don’t push it from memory but rather use it as a tool.  Own your past suffering and make it work for you.  Another planting proverb states that “pain is weakness leaving the body”.  Suffering will always be present in our lives, how we respond to it will determine our joy and happiness.

photo credit: Luc Forsyth via Flickr (licence)