A life of ever increasing rhythm, maybe more than we imagined at our young hood, daily duties multiplying with the complexity of life and the over crowdness, sciences progressing offering new technologies that we have to absorb due to work and life requirements, flood of information that we acquire to be empowered and updated.
You may be a scientist, an employee, a manager or a specialized technician but you can be asking yourself when can you do all what is necessary or required, and if you do it all when can you enjoy spare time if you don’t live the moment with performance and perfection?
You may not find spare time, and even if you find it, you may be exhausted so you relax with the family or you watch a program or episode, comfort may not be enough to renew the energy as it is a life that consume physical, mental and muscular effort and the body itself.
You may find yourself pushed to reflect with the passage of years about if your life was truly happy or if your health will long tolerate stresses and crisis that even if you didn’t experience except some, they engraved their effects as bodily diseases; hence comfort is not enough, the energy is consumed, problems don’t wait, and energy renovation may be necessary to improve health performance and happiness.
In your spare time, you may resort to a book, but reading requires effort and concentration. You may practice inpidual sport but you may feel sort off fulfilling a duty if it was not exciting.
You may meet friends but only if they have time and will. You may watch a film or a theatre play but you may be only a receiver, so what do you think about gardening?
Do you find it a manual work that does not deserve your time and effort and does not correspond to your job, prestige and social status?
Just look to their life across the Mediterranean, many are deserting the life of the noisy capitals to the towns, suburbs and villages or owning a country house, technical work is expensive so traditional education is developing the talents of manual work for artistic creation for self-expression and to perform the urgent and simple maintenance work.
Some of them would find in the country side life tranquility, serenity, beauty, and abundance of time, space and services, so country houses can be wider and legally the garden should occupy most of the land area; hence the human being returns a part of pure nature and clean environment that charges his senses with beauty to be transformed from a meaning to a significance and a higher value, a nucleus of coherent value system with components like discipline, cleanliness, perfection, care, giving and love of life.
If you work in a garden, you are really practicing a useful and enjoyable sport; caring for plants is an experience of giving, kindness and care.
Removing the harmful weeds is like self-purification. Picking dying flowers and branches is like improving use of energy. Watching trees growing and flowers blossoming are like the pleasure of educating and growing a child.
The garden is a teacher of beauty and its beauty is a proof of perfection, love and harmony, a gratitude to persevering effort done with patience and faith of the value of life and hope.
If you are alone or surrounded by stresses, looking down inside yourself and you find yourself living the bitterness and the sadness, simply come out to the world of truth and beauty to fill your senses with noble meanings and the pleasure of life, come out from your tight shell to the wide life to see it with true eyes, a fiery hope, and renovated energy.
If you have a garden make it your teacher, your healer and your friend, to open up your senses, to grant you pure air, pleasant aroma and a picture of bright colors and shapes, you painted with effort, renovation and care to bring you back to where you came from; a sun of nature, a part of one, and a toothed wheel in the machine of life.
By Dr. Hadi Eltonsi, Retired Ambassador and Medical Doctor
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