The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)
"The days drag by. I'm choked by the food I swallow, the words I say. The daylight screams at me every morning to get up. Sleep is only dreams that chase me. The darkness rustles with ghosts and memories."
When people buy lottery tickets they're told things like 'you have more chance of being struck by lightning than winning' and that kind of thing. And those odds are there if someone were to choose to look them up. However, people who play the lottery are working to a different equation. They're working to 'either I win or I don't', which you can also explain as 'if not A then B', or, if you're not a fan of that way of talking, you can toss a coin and say 'heads or tails?'. And who wouldn't play with those odds in their mind? You'd be a fool not to, there's a great deal of money at stake there. Of course, if you want to get technical about the odds of that 'either I win or I don't' mentality, then you're looking at a coin that has one head and a considerable number of tails (or vice versa).
But let's imagine for a moment that we don't have all these tails lying around the place, and that everything is really just that simple: every possibility is 'if not A then B' and see where we end up.
Now I don't know you, not really, but I'm going to guess that either you're struggling for money or you're not. Let's say you are struggling: you're probably either struggling despite working as much as you can and having a good, strong, Protestant work-ethic, or you're one of those people that, for one reason or another, allows a struggling state to persist. Am I close? Now let's imagine that you're not struggling for money: in that case you're probably either someone who has worked hard for what they have, or someone who has been lucky. If you're someone who's worked hard then you've probably had to sacrifice something that people who struggle for money are able to attain more easily, like time with friends, family, etc. How am I doing so far? Close? I'm doing nothing more than an 'either/or' system, but it's surprisingly far reaching, and not too shabby in terms of accuracy. Carl Sagan explained this way of thinking in terms of 'bits', playing out a game of 20 questions and replacing the term 'question' with 'bit'. After 20 questions (bits) you'll manage to come a great deal further than you thought you would. I'm sure you're excited about the possibility of being able to point out holes in this system, but let's be adults for a minute and look at the overall accuracy rather than the exceptions to the rule. There are always exceptions to every rule, and pointing these out is tiresome.
Instead, let's go back to that idea of a good, strong, Protestant work-ethic, and let that take us somewhere else: let's say that person A spends a great deal of time on something, and they work hard at it, hours and hours a day. Then let's say that person B also spends time on the same something, but far far less time, and they don't work hard at it at all. In fact, they barely register this role/responsibility. Then there's a sudden act of God: rain or fire or whatever, and the product of both A and B's labour is lost. Who do you think is more 'wronged' in this situation? Person A or B? A lot of people would say person A outright, so let's think about why they say that: person A has spent more time on the task, and has worked hard, and presumably has a lot of emotions wrapped up in it, so their loss is... what... worth more than someone else's? Wait a minute... that doesn't sound right. How can one person's loss be worth more or less than another person's if you're talking about two people losing the same thing? Oh, because of the attitude that we bring hard work to bear on something, of course. Now I get it. In our heads we think that person A has not only lost whatever the 'thing' is that we're talking about, but they've also lost something abstract, intangible, something that person B never had in the first place. Does that sound accurate? Would you go along with this? Don't be ashamed if you do, I think a great many people would. The only problem with this idea is that we're starting to move towards the stance that the universe in some way owes you something because you put in time and effort, and we all know that this isn't the case.
Terrible things happen to nice people every day. Ideas of being owed something just don't carry any weight here. You can want this to not be true all you like, but that doesn't change a thing. Sometimes I think of this in relation to that scene in Grizzly Man (2005) where Werner Herzog talks about Timothy Treadwell's belief that there was some degree of kinship within the eyes of the bears (if you haven't seen Grizzly Man, no fear: it's a documentary about a man called Timothy Treadwell who spent many years living with bears. He recorded his summers out there, but eventually he and his partner were killed by one of the bears. The audio footage of their deaths exists and much is made of what to do with that footage.). All Herzog sees in those eyes is the 'overwhelming indifference of nature'. And I don't believe he's wrong here. Nature, and the universe, is characterised by an overwhelming indifference towards you. It neither knows nor cares about you and your struggles. We throw around 'that's not fair' quite a lot, but when we do this we're highlighting the idea that we have a belief system that puts the intangible into an equation, that puts emotion into an equation, that puts hard work and effort into an equation, and things just don't work like that.
Have I told you the story of my lawn? Because I believe that a lot of these topics are wrapped up in that.
The story of Ben's lawn:
Recently I was discussing how my lawn needed improving. I tried my hardest with it, but I'm not particularly gifted with lawns (not to mention that I now know that there were many things I was doing wrong), and then I found myself walking past a pile of rolled up turf with a note on it saying '*FREE* Please take'. Naturally, I took this to be some kind of sign. It goes without saying that it wasn't, and that there is no great plan that I was falling into, but that's how it felt when I walked past. I took as much lawn as I could. It would have been all 15 rolls, but 3 of them disappeared while I was involved in the back and forth to my house, so I ended up with 12. Now, 15 would have probably been absolutely perfect, but I like to think that I made 12 work as well as anyone could.
Getting the turf home was actually a lot more difficult than I'm making it sound. The turf was close enough to my house to make the idea of not taking it insane, but not close enough that the carrying of the turf did not slay me. I'm old now, and getting older all the time, and turf is heavy. 1+1+1=3. When I got it back to my garden I piled the turf up in a pyramid shape. Don't ask me why, I just did. It seemed to be the natural way to stack turf. Then I set about stripping a 2x3 foot patch of lawn to see how hard it was to strip the old turf, and to get an idea of how long it would take. It didn't take that long, and stripping the dead layer of turf from the top of the lawn seemed both easier and more difficult than I had anticipated: easier because it all comes off in large pieces, instead of the tiny scrapings I had imagined (like stripping paint, let's say); more difficult because the lawn is attached to the soil at every square millimeter: there are no gaps whatsoever. If you've never stripped a lawn before, imagine gluing two pieces of lino together, supergluing them to the ground, and then separating them. If that doesn't work for you try to imagine scalping a human. It is, I would think, very similar to stripping a lawn. But a scalp the size of a bus, obviously.
Anyway, my 2x3 patch seemed okay, and I felt pretty confident that I would have the entire lawn stripped in about 4 hours the next day. My calculation was not a million miles off, but didn't take into account a tiredness ratio. Obviously, as you go on, you become more tired, and then an action becomes slower, and you take more time to complete it. If I'd considered that variable I think I would have correctly estimated how long it took (approximately 5.5 hours to strip the entire lawn, with no breaks, if you're interested).
The next day was all lawn. I was up early and straight into it (after a coffee, obviously). It was... not easy, let's say that. After an hour or so I wrapped kinesio tape around my hands, but not in time to prevent blistering both my hands. To begin with it felt like I wasn't getting anywhere. I finished a quarter of it and instead of thinking 'I have finished a quarter of it' I heard myself say 'I have *not* finished three quarters of it'. This pattern of 'glass half empty' thinking persisted until it was finally complete, and that was interesting. I was never focused on how much I had done, but rather how much I had not done. I was extremely muddy and sweaty by the time I had removed all the old turf, and both my hands were alive with pain (it was a good 5 days before I could comfortably use my hands again), but I was all caught up in the momentum of the whole thing and got straight to leveling and raking and feeding the soil. Once it was as flat as someone who isn't a Gardener can get it, I set about laying the turf on top. Now, let's all remember that I had 12 rolls instead of the full 15, so I had to 'Krypton Factor' a way to get as much coverage as possible (if you don't know the Krypton Factor then I apologise, perhaps you can just imagine a Professor Layton lawn coverage game instead). This involved cutting sections of the turf to jigsaw pieces together. I checked videos out of this online first, of course, not wanting to go in blind.
The actual laying of the turf itself was a deeply satisfying experience: it was a very hot day, I was exhausted, and looked a lot like that lady at the end of The Descent (2005) by the time I was done (If you haven't seen The Descent, no fear: it features an exhausted, muddy lady when the credits roll), but with the end in sight I was bolstered by an unusual sense of optimism combined with satisfaction. It was during the laying of the turf that I discovered an ants nest in my pyramid. Now, I'd made that pyramid the day before, and there had been no ants whatsoever, so they must have moved in overnight. But, good lord, what a move! There were tens of thousands of them, all dashing this way and that, carrying their eggs to safety. I'd never actually had the chance to see an ants nest in front of my eyes before, so sitting and watching the ants scatter (after an initial 'bleurgh!' moment while actually handling the turf rolls) made the entire experience just that little bit more memorable. I have no idea where the ants scattered to, but in around 15 to 20 minutes the bulk of the nest had vanished, leaving only the occasional straggler remaining. For the rest of that day I would keep finding lone ants wandering the lawn carrying an egg and looking in vain for their comrades. I can only hope that they all managed to find each other again.
Finally, everything was in place, and it's now an ongoing daily existence of watering, mowing, and maintaining the lawn to keep it looking splendid. My story is far from over, but those are all the 'interesting' elements of that day for you.
Epilogue:
Let's summarise a few key aspects of my lawn story: although I needed to improve my lawn, the universe did not owe me a lawn. But one appeared. It's difficult to avoid the trap of thinking of large plans and grand designs here, but I try my best. However, despite the kismet, I *did* undeniably work hard at that thing. I put a lot of time and effort into it, ended up with many aches and pains, but, of course, this does not guarantee success. It's quite possible that I'll come home one day and the entire thing will be arid and brown and dry as a bone, in spite of my best efforts. Just because I have worked (and am working) hard at this does not ensure I will avoid failure. And what about the ants? Their part in my story is little more than a footnote, but I doubt that's how the ants would see it. Rather, for them it's a story of how they were robbed, and scattered. An epic story of woe.
I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from my lawn story, although really I think there are many lessons to be learned from every story. This one is as good as any other. What I would encourage, though, is for you to look into your own past and to see if there are any stories in there from which you have similar lessons to be learned.
Articles like this are somewhat like an inverted pyramid: they start as broad as possible, and then work towards a point. You take a reader on a journey that becomes more and more specific as it goes along. Being that I'm all for giving you a little work these days, what do you think that point might be? Please note, that was 'all for giving', not 'all forgiving'.