One Sunday afternoon in late winter as my sister-in-law Chris and I were doing our weekly walk, she told me she was going to start building her first compost pile. I thought it was great that she was going to begin composting. But even more interesting was what she said immediately afterward:
It’s just an experiment. It might work. It might not.
To someone like me who has always been wired to overthink and worry about everything, that statement seemed bold, refreshing and freeing. So I told her.
Wow, I like that.
It turned out that Chris had recently decided to take a more experimental view with a lot of things, and it was working for her. It made her feel good about being ambitious with trying new things, even with the long hours she puts in at work.
In 2021, I had good success growing a small patch of wildflowers from seed here at Mom’s house. It was a nice creative project I could enjoy as I took care of her. This year, I had decided to expand the wildflower beds and grow some herbs—something I’ve always enjoyed. Of course, with my dreams came my customary worries:
What if the seeds don’t germinate?
What if we have a late frost?
What if we have a drought like we did two years ago and everything dies?
What if I’m biting off more than I can chew right now and it turns into a big, hideous patch of weeds—a daily reminder that I couldn’t do all this stuff along with my day and night jobs?
Oh stop it already, Cheryl.
It’s an experiment. You don’t know what the outcome will be. It might turn out great. It might fail.
Somehow looking at it as an experiment enabled me to stop worrying about the what ifs and just dive in. I could say the f word—failure—in my head and live through it.
So I started cilantro, basil and zinnias from seed in the mini greenhouse my nephew Ben had built us this winter.
I fiddled around with electric heaters and got about a 50% germination rate. Not great, but I didn’t sweat it. The seeds that did sprout did well.
In May, we doubled the size of the wildflower gardens, bringing in some topsoil with my brother Andy’s help.
I mixed wildflower seeds with white play sand and sowed them the following weekend when the weather had turned consistently warm. The zinnias and herbs we'd grown from seed were ready to be transplanted as well. If the experiment worked, the area I used for meditation and evening fires would be embraced by cosmos, coreopsis, zinnias, four o’clocks and more.
Jimmy and I started catching rainwater for use in between what nature provided, adding rain barrels to the downspouts on the house and our shed as we saw it working, which made us more efficient and cut down on our labor. We were able to water the growing flower beds with hoses connected to the rain barrels, letting gravity do a lot of the work.
The experiment worked. Beautifully and imperfectly.
We’re enjoying hundreds of cosmos blossoms on plants that are easily a foot taller than I am.
The basil seeds that germinated in the greenhouse became the best basil plants I’ve ever grown. I’ve had enough sweet basil to let me finally figure out how to make truly good pesto.
The Burpee Big Red zinnias I coaxed from seeds drew in hummingbirds and American goldfinches. And one big, fat groundhog who ate them whenever she had the chance.
And the sacred space which gives me such happiness became surrounded with flowers that the pollinators would soon discover and that would bring me peace.
Lately I’ve been wondering what would have happened if I had been able to take a more experimental view of things during my career. I probably would have achieved the same or similar results, but I could have gotten there with more joy. It could all have been a lot more fun and I would have learned more. Maybe things would have turned out even better.
I’ll never know, and there’s nothing to be gained by looking back. What I do know is that I feel better and learn more when I don’t take every damned thing so seriously.
As Chris and I walked around the track at PSU Altoona this summer, we kicked around our plans for the fall and beyond, laughing about our ambitions and reminding ourselves that we’re just experimenting. The cool thing is, it’s become how we see things now. We talk a lot more about our possibilities than our limits.
That’s my wish for you: that you can offload some worry and trade it in for some joy and possibility. What can you experiment with today?
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