Let the leaves lie

We illuminate the night, so we need blackout curtains in order to sleep. Then, we need an alarm clock to wake us up. (Image by Kosti Keistinen)

My tiny city in Maine has a very different culture from Atlanta, where I spent most of my adulthood.

One major difference is the sound of fall. Here, it's quiet. Why? Because no one owns a leaf blower.

People do some raking, I guess. But mostly, they leave the leaves alone. Soon enough, they'll be under snow. And nobody seems to expect their landscaping to look like a golf course. It's simply a more casual approach to yard maintenance (to match the more casual approach to personal grooming, I suppose).

The choice to let the leaves lie has a number of positive benefits. The lack of leaf blowers means not only less noise, but less burning of fuel. People aren't expected spend lots of money and time on their manicuring their lawns, so it's freed up for other things.

Ironically, this is better for the grasses and gardens. The leaves form a natural, free mulch that protects the dormant plants beneath from winter ravages.

So many things in life seem to be this way. We add a bunch of complexity to something very simple.

Advertisers manufacture insecurity so that they can sell us things we don't need (like mouthwash to mess with the oral microbiome).

We see someone else doing something (like fancy letterboard pictures to commemorate each month of a child's life) and now we feel like we have to do it, too.

We want to show that we know stuff, so we set things up so that we can demonstrate that we know stuff.

We bought a new gadget, so now we want to find something to fix—or even break it so we can fix it.

Maybe we just want to feel useful, so we do something when we could be doing nothing.

Sometimes, we've inherited a project that has layers and layers of tweaks and adjustments and conditional instructions piled onto it. We have to get good at the work before we are able to figure out which of those instructions are actually needed.

Maybe that is a metaphor for life itself. How much of that which we've inherited from previous generations (what we call culture) is something that serves us today? How much is truly necessary? I suggest that a lot of it is cruft. And much of that is harmless baggage, but some of it is not.

I had the opportunity recently to lead a couple of projects in some areas that were new to me. And even though I prize simplicity and directness, I found myself adding complexity and layers of unnecessary red tape. I realized that I was channeling my conscientiousness and desire to serve into a bunch of effort for the sake of effort. Yikes! As soon as I figured out that's what I was doing, I cut it out. I think. I hope.

We do plenty of things just for the fun of it. Knitting a sweater by hand isn't very efficient, but it is a joy. The problem comes when we're doing the work with a grim determination to get to the end without questioning whether the work needs to happen at all (or whether it needs to happen the way we're doing it). Maybe we're rearranging leaves that we might as well ignore.

Is it possible that the unpleasant work we're doing to justify our presence or prove ourselves is, in fact, optional? If we let go, will the entire neighborhood breathe a sigh of relief because the horrible buzzing has finally ended? The best way to find out is to try it. Or really, to stop trying so hard.