Imagine your mind as a garden, and your thoughts, memories, attitudes, and beliefs are the plants that grow within it.
Good memories and positive reflections grow into beautiful plants and flowers, difficult and uncomfortable thoughts might be more difficult to control, and negative experiences and feelings may be thorny and invasive.
Over time the garden grows, but it will become unwieldy and overgrown if you don’t tend to it. After a while, seeing the beautiful plants and flowers becomes more challenging as they get overwhelmed by the more invasive weeds.
One day, you choose to work on the garden but don’t know where to start. You decide to put it into the ‘too hard basket’ for today and open a beer instead. You’ll sort it in tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes, and you venture back out. But this time, the garden is even worse; ivy is beginning to entangle everything. You make a start but feel like you’re getting nowhere. You open a beer again.
Day after day, this goes on until you eventually can’t afford to ignore it any longer. First, you must address the beer; it isn’t helping; you’re just putting things off. You remove the ivy to reveal the scale of the job underneath. You need to formulate a plan.
You consider razing it to the ground, back to bare earth. Perhaps it’s best to start again. But you realise that there are beautiful flowers and plants that you want to keep, so you decide the only way forward is to get in amongst them and work gently.
You spend the whole day clearing space by weeding and pruning and, after a long day and with a sore back, you admire the hard work. You’re far from finished, but you can see glimpses of your favourite plants and flowers again. You feel inspired to work on it again tomorrow.
You repeat this day after day, a bit of pruning here and weeding there, and each day you marvel as the beautiful garden returns. After a while, you realise that totally eradicating weeds is futile; they’ll always grow back. But you now accept that you can keep them under control with a little bit of maintenance. After all, they’re part of the broader ecosystem and help keep caterpillars off the lettuce!