Watering Habits One Drop at a Time
On mornings where I don’t want to bother with watering my plants, I always think about the fact that my plants remain beautiful and bring me joy whether or not I’m having the greatest day. So I can’t forget to water them. In the same way, we can’t abandon habits that we want to develop when things get hard. In fact, those are the hot days where we need to make sure we follow through the most.
Sadly, I can count on a couple of heat waves each summer to hit us in the Pacific Northwest these days. And since I have mainly water loving plants like hydrangeas on my balcony, for the last few years I’ve used a pretty neat auto watering system made up of a network of tubes with hollow stakes and a pump. I fill a large tank of water that in the shade so as to slow evaporation. One end of the tubing draws the water out of the tank and the pump pushes the water out and then the hollow stakes distributes the water is steady drips down in the roots of the plants where the plants will be best able to take advantage of the water.
In this way, no water evaporates when the stakes distribute the water and the water is taken right to where its needed. In that way, a little bit of water distributed frequently throughout the day does a marvelous job of keeping my plants alive and really thriving under most temperature conditions.
Isn’t it interesting how many things in life are like that? A little bit of consistent effort dedicated to the right things can help us be successful. A little bit of dedicated exercise, language studying, music practice, novel writing, or house cleaning being directed in the right way can lead to amazing results if we do it frequently.
One challenge we face with testing this out however, is that usually this is not an exact science, meaning, that we need to test things out, adjust the amount or time of the day or approach for best results just like I’ve had to test out how much water to distribute and how frequently. And even when we thing we’ve figured out the best recipe, different days might call for different approaches, but that’s okay. Leaving a room less than perfectly put together or a shorter workout or cranking out a few words rather than a few pages of a novel can keep the good habits we’re wanting to developing growing within us.
On mornings where I don’t want to bother with watering my plants, I always think about the fact that my plants remain beautiful and bring me joy whether or not I’m having the greatest day. So I can’t forget to water them. In the same way, we can’t abandon habits that we want to develop when things get hard. In fact, those are the hot days where we need to make sure we follow through the most.