On Tuesday morning – the last of 2024 – I had a phone conversation with Scott Beuerlein, one of my co-editors here at GardenRant, checking in on his mobility after hip surgery this month. With his schedule, I just couldn’t wait for a letter.
Somewhere in a conversation that ranged from the sneaky infiltration of AI into garden writing, to the weirdness of aging, to impossible New Year’s resolutions (all terrifying propositions), we recognized that the best way to move forward, older and wiser into another year, is to commit oneself to more moments of being fully and deeply distracted by joy.
He – acknowledging that a Christmas visit from a tiny granddaughter had erased any considerations of hip and hurt in the time he spent with her, replacing them with wonder and love (no small feat).
Me – recognizing that my own stressors miraculously disappeared in an hour’s watching of the rich diversity of bird life at the feeder while I intensively sorted seeds for the season ahead.
Well, the diversity didn’t show up for this photo, but you get the picture.
Both were real experiences based either in our natural world or in the human beings that share it with us.
The thought stayed with me after I put down the phone, and led me to leave my office where administrative distractions breed like rabbits (and are just as difficult to catch). I headed to the dining room table with my laptop and the makings of a long overdue post about last May’s UK Garden Adventure group tour swirling in my head.
The house was quiet and the birds were at the feeder, and I tucked into the pleasure of revisiting those experiences as I slowly sorted through photos. Before I knew it, hours had passed, distracted by joy. The birds, the memories, the excitement of a trip to come.
Distracted? Who Me?
Advocating for distraction in our modern world seems laughable. After all, we are absurdly distracted. Who needs more?
Quite beyond the admin of an electronic life that promised less paper only to give us more (plus an inbox!); we daily hand over vast chunks of our precious, too-short life to entities that similarly promise entertainment, instruction, & connection, but often deliver a vague sense of unease in comparisons over status and success.
This distraction is not a deeply joyful one. Inevitably our thoughts turn inwards towards self, not outwards towards others, even as our ability to show superficial and fleeting support for one of a thousand issues (or people) makes us feel our duty is discharged. In spending that time, we tend to spend less and less time with the people themselves.
Give me personal interaction over virtual any day of the week – here’s me and Kathy Jentz, editor of Washington Gardener Magazine and The DC Garden Podcast on our way to The Galanthus Gala.
So, we ravenously subscribe to new apps to make us masters of our lives – to keep us calm, healthy, aware, and productive – but which serve instead as benevolent dictators. Even as they admonish us to keep our screen time down because they care, two more alternatives to engage are offered, and yet another tiny modification of an existing app forces us to spend an hour relearning the learned.
Put it down? Not so easy. After all it makes no sense to step away from a device that you have set up to alert you to a thrice-daily moment of mindfulness. So you don’t. And how can you put down a device that must stay with you to track your heartrate and steps; or which requires daily engagement to keep your streak going in the perceived worthiness of a language learning platform or a brain-teasing puzzle?
Can you refuse to engage when your employer or school insists that you keep ever-close one of twenty-five platforms that might require your immediate attention? Does the switch from electronic beeps to resonant temple bells somehow temper the grim reality of mounting messages in a besieged inbox?
Yes we are distracted. But so rarely by joy. We exist in an age of hyper-novelty, where it is not enough for us to merely accept the pace of astounding change. We must celebrate it, and even dismiss with contempt others who question the sanity of it.
Perhaps if the statistics painted a better picture of hyper-evolving generations moving in tandem with the pace of change, we could paint another picture of grumbling fogies shaking their fists at the sky; but alas, the steep climb in prescriptions for anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs (particularly for the young), does not support that theory.
You can’t do this on Zoom. Andy Pulte, Dan Benarcik, Me and Irvin Etienne at this year’s Perennial Plant Association Symposium in Asheville.
A Grounded Garden is Not Immune
For those of us who were adults when this all this irony started – when the phones stopped conversations, the social media platforms made us less social, and the on-demand entertainment heightened our appetites instead of satiating them – the contrast between what was and what is, is stark.
And for those of us who shifted into a new world of garden media – the contrast between the gentle, grounded life we promote, and the frenetic constant contact backstory that makes it possible, is just as startling.
In the beginning I felt that horticulture — by virtue of its literal grounding — would be inherently immunized against this shift. I was wrong – the culture is too pervasive and the industry is a retail one that must (understandably) compete.
My very first guest post for GardenRant in 2014 questioned the value of constant, often inconsequential, contact made possible by social media and daily blogging, and the way in which that new requirement got in the way of the work itself both for writers and readers. It was met with a mixture of understanding, and dismissal. I answered some of the naysayers in the comments:
“Whether it is about cooking or gardening, philosophy or historical events, good writing takes time; and to write with any credibility whatsoever, one must use a great deal of that time exploring, researching and working in the field one has chosen. Unless one has a staff, or comes together with others to run a world-class website (such as this one), that life is not compatible with posting, following, commenting, uploading, updating and tweeting on a nearly constant basis. It is particularly not compatible with a profession that values patience, time, and the natural world above most things.”
Another, in 2016, wondered what the repercussions of garden media made up of Influencers and Followers would eventually look like. I didn’t hold out hope for “independent.” But the disconnect only grew.
And horticulture is not the only ‘grounded’ discipline that shares this issue.
The paradox of promotion
I regularly meet up with a friend of mine who is a skilled and experienced teacher of yoga. Over hours of conversation, we have found ourselves reflecting upon the paradox of promotion.
The paradox is this: the practices that make both horticulture and yoga (and many other contemplative disciplines) the soul-filling practices they are (quiet, meditation, absorption, observation), are precisely the practices shattered by the addictive tools now required for educators to reach those who desperately need an answer to a frenetic life. Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc… are all ready and waiting to show you how to do a perfect Downward Dog or Warrior II — or plant a tomato — but that’s not all you’ll get.
Start looking online for a Yoga studio to calm the hell down and get yourself off the scrolling, watching, all-consuming hamster wheel, and you will invariably find yourself losing hours to – Hey, what’s hot yoga? And damn, he’s flexible. And wow, is she really in Shavasana on the edge of the Grand Canyon? And what’s goat yoga? And how difficult are goats to raise anyway? And I’ve been thinking about raising goats…and…OMG what a funny reel about goats…I’ll just send that to my sister….and…and…and….
So much for the yoga – you could have attended two sessions in the time you just gave away.
Contrast that with the Before Times – a quick flip through the white pages or newspaper for a local studio, the browsing through a bookstore or library for a book about Vinyasa poses and the opening and closing of that book at bedtime.
You open it. You close it. It doesn’t own you, ad you, or addict you.
And the consumer is not the only one struggling. By necessity of a new marketplace, the yogi finds herself reluctantly adding to the endless distractions that negate what she teaches. In opposition to her philosophy of deeper, meaningful, connections in real time, she is forced to spend time in the shallowest of interactions to retain and engage the followers (read: possible customers) she has. It’s an odd place to be.
Reels, posts, notes, newsletters, shorts, challenges, polls, snaps, tweets. Though there are pills of information smuggled in with the jam, it’s really about the jam, and the engagement numbers prove it.
Ellis Hamburger writes about this endless engagement in a 2023 article for The Verge “[Platforms] have spontaneously discovered that shortform videos from strangers are simply more compelling than the posts and messages from friends that made up traditional social media. Call it the carcinization of social media, an inevitable outcome for feeds built only around engagement and popularity.”
We all need a little jam. But we need to prioritize the nourishing calories more. Perhaps the waning engagement on social media platforms discussed by many creators lately may be a sign of disillusionment. Perhaps the realization is beginning to dawn that it is the actual doing of the thing that is the joy – not watching someone else do it until we fall asleep, wearied by the scroll.
The yoga. The garden-making. The instrument playing. The book writing. The meal preparation. The face-to-face conversations with people we love.
That’s my New Year’s resolution for 2025 – and thanks to that conversation with Scott, it’s not terrifying, it’s freeing. More feet-first, outward-facing distraction that takes me out of my head and into the moment, fully, deliciously, and (funnily enough), intentionally distracted by joy.
Happy New Year everyone!!
