Your Mind is Like a Garden

It needs attention and work

When I was a kid, my parents had a garden. For several years, while we lived in rural Culpeper County, Virginia, we grew our own fruits and vegetables. My favorite was the corn. I loved how my mom prepared corn on the cob with melted butter. I can still taste it. Yum!

My job was to pull weeds. I hated it. But my dad explained that, if I didn’t pull the weeds, the garden wouldn’t produce what we wanted it to produce.

I learned quickly that gardening takes work.

You have to plan out the garden, treat the soil, remove the weeds (my job), plant the right seeds, water those seeds, keep the insects and other animals away, prune what was growing, and eventually reap the harvest.

I’m sure I’m leaving out a few steps but this isn’t an article on gardening. And it’s been a few years.

The point is… Gardening takes work.

The same is true with your mind.

What thoughts you do plant? And water? What thoughts do you pull out and get rid of? And what do you do to regulate the input into your mind?

James Allen was a late 19th and early 20th-century writer and early pioneer in the self-help movement. His most famous work is the short book As a Man Thinketh (published in 1903).

I was re-reading that little book this week. It was my second or third time through it, and I came across this quote which inspired this article…

“MAN’S mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth.” (James Allen)

If we started thinking of our mind like a garden, perhaps it would remind us that our minds need our attention and care — and our mental and emotional health requires work.

Are you giving your mind the attention and work that it deserves?

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