Exertion

Today I tilled the raised beds, after adding amendments. I raised a couple of blisters...spent about 7 hours out there. It didn't feel like work...work, to me, is listening to people's problems hour after hour and lots of mental exertion on my part. Gardening is simple physical labor, a complete respite from my busy mind. The zen of silence.

DH Matt said that on the scale of our garden, it's no longer gardening, but farming. "Hush", I said, "Farming is hard work. gardening is fun. Let's keep calling it hobby gardening no matter how large it becomes. Then, it's still play".

DH Matt thought about that for a minute. He made a comparison to "working out" at the gym or hiking for hours as being very comparable to our summer projects in energy expenditure. We just usually think of one type of exertion as "play" and the other as "work". He concluded, "It's all mental."

DH plays a video game hour after hour in the evenings, "Perfect World". It's a visually beautiful world, I constantly find myself drawn in by the graphics when I watch over his shoulder. He's invited me to play,and to join his "faction". No, no, no, not for me. As I see it, you talk to lots of people, solve puzzles and problems and slay monsters of some sort of another. That perfectly describes my day job as a counselor. What relaxes him would fatigue me.

DH Matt was until recently a successful property developer. He has a "nose" for purchasing property, splitting it, and selling it at a profit usually exceeding 100%. As you can imagine, he is not working on that these days. Like everyone else we lost money, at least half of our assets and probably much more. We don't sit and count it, what would be the point?

So, DH Matt is currently working on our own modest house. He's trenching for irrigation and power, putting in the septic field, and brushing for the 200' clearance required for local code. This is, as you might imagine, a lot of physical work and also solitary work. It is work for him, not play time. DH comes into the house late, around 7:30 in the evening, both dirty and thirsty for the solace of conversation. I have spent a long day both listening and talking to many, many people, attending to their needs. It's taken both attention and practice to put my own desire for solitude away for a period in the evening to respond to DH.

Reflecting upon all of this, I think that exertion is a refection of our value system. We do what we want to do, and we do what we need to do. We can all make that exertion difficult by thinking of it as hard work, but we spend the same amount of energy at activities that we consider "play". One person's work is often another person's play. In the end, it is all the same; it's all mental.