Ed Cyzewski

The blessing of an unwilling gift

This is the first time in a long time that we have moved to a new home without a single plant from our previous garden.

We’ve driven herbs and flowers on all-day drives from Connecticut to Ohio. We started a garden from scratch in Connecticut from our garden in Vermont. And our family in Vermont dug up their own plants to fill our garden a few weeks after we moved in to our first home in Vermont.

When we moved to Columbus, the last thing I wanted to do on moving day was to dig holes for eight different flowers in dusty, rocky soil of our front garden bed.

However, there was something familiar and comforting to transport the flowers that we had received from family in Vermont, transplanted to our apartment in Connecticut, and then brought with us to Ohio.

For our latest move to Kentucky at the peak of summer heat in the midst of finishing a graduate program and powering through a freelance business with two small kids, we chose to part ways with our flowers and everything else in our vegetable garden.

Even worse, our landlord changed his mind about the raised bed garden that I had painstakingly constructed.

The garden that had become my sanctuary for restoration and renewal and filled our table with greens all summer had to go because he wanted to sell the house we’d rented for the past five years.

We planted garlic last fall, thinking we would be able to harvest it before moving, but the timing didn’t work. We dug every last bulb up with the help of friends and shipped it off to their garden.

We had flourishing kale and lettuce in the garden, so we harvested big bunches of each for our own meals and gave the rest away to friends. We gave away boxes of kale plants to friends.

Our grape vine and blackberries had to go too. We dug ditches around each plant, yanking out their roots and dropping them into garbage bags for friends.

After a few weeks of giving away plants, dirt, and wood from the raised beds, I scattered grass seeds into the rich dirt left behind from our garden.

As I watered the bland little seeds scattered in our garden each night, I remembered the day that I unloaded the dirt from our station wagon into the yard. I had been delighted to have less lawn to mow.

Grass has been my nemesis ever since I was old enough to mow it. Now I was helping it reclaim my garden.

Processing the loss of this quiet, sacred space that had produced so much food for our family and friends, I looked for perspective on leaving so many flowers and vegetables behind.

What is the point of so much work if you aren’t able to actually hold onto it and enjoy it?

After much soul-searching and prayer, I arrived at something that felt like an answer, if not a resolution to my loss: the garden is a gift, but it’s not my gift to keep.

It’s true that the garden started out as a gift to myself, my family, and a few friends here and there when harvests grew plentiful. However, in light of our family’s move, the garden became an enduring gift for our friends, some of it for the summer, some of it for years to come.

My sense of loss, though very real, was ultimately self-centered. I had cultivated something that hadn’t just provided us with food over the years. I had provided a gift to many of our friends.

Their children learned about transplanting grape vines, blackberries, and garlic. They found the plants that had re-seeded from last year in our alley and took them home in paper cups.

Several gardens were filled up for the summer after dividing up my garden.

I suppose I had a more dramatic hand off in mind for the garden.

I imagined our landlord bringing in a new couple to the home after we moved out. I thought of them surveying the raised beds, the wood chip paths, the flowers, and the clever fence system that kept out squirrels.

I imagined us taking our berry bushes off to some new home where our kids would learn to stuff their faces while playing games in the yard.

The former will never happen and the latter will have to wait.

What I was forced to do was actually better.

We blessed our friends with something precious, and it’s a shame that I didn’t think of that right from the start.

By sacrificing my garden, I left much better gifts behind that helped me see the way that I clutch my blessings, hold them back from others, and even deprive myself of the joy of seeing others flourish with the fruits of my hard work.

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I’m not dominating the world and you can, too

by Ed Cyzewski

Garlic is what I have to grow more than anything else in my garden because it provides a desperately needed, ever present, year-round lesson that I can’t find anywhere else.

This fall I embraced the pure chaos of gardening with my small children in order to put the garlic in. The one-year-old chewed on the stems from the seed garlic and tried to shove clumps of dirt into his mouth. The three-year-old was assigned a section of the garden to demolish with a spade as he saw fit, and he wasn’t lacking in enthusiasm.

I managed to shove the garlic into something close to rows, but the days of carefully turning over the soil, smoothing it out, placing guides for each row, and measuring in between each clove are over. I dumped compost over the cloves as my boys shrieked and fought over shovels at the sand table. I just needed ten more seconds to smooth the dirt out—never mind.

“Just last 10… more… seconds…” is one of my daily mantras for my kids.

This week we’re cooking with the garlic that I planted last fall. In Ohio, we can plant garlic around early October and harvest it in July. That’s nine months of waiting from planting to harvest, and often a year before you can eat most of it.

There is no life hack, fast lane, or secret to doubling your output with garlic. It is unrelentingly slow and fair beyond all reason. Garlic reaps precisely what you sow.

With garlic, you do the work, you wait, and then you harvest when it’s fully ready.

I grew garlic long before I realized it had anything to teach me. In those days I used to work long hours, taking the advice of business gurus that you could push your limits, work faster, and rise to new heights if you worked longer hours than anyone else. I implemented smarter systems, improved my speed in everything, and let my work spill into just about every evening since there’s always one more thing to do.

After about a year of pushing myself at this pace, I hit a wall.

I had two big problems in my work: I lacked focus, and I neglected boundaries that would have helped me work at a sustainable pace.

It’s true that some business and productivity experts have crushed the competition and achieved GLOBAL DOMINATION, or whatever they want to call “work.” They have worked harder, faster, and smarter than the rest of us. I learned after a year of anxiety and misery that I needed boundaries, limits, and a more sustainable pace that means I won’t be the best in anything, ever.

I made the mistake of setting up the over-achievers as my ideal. Perhaps they have something that drives them to work without limits no matter what the cost may be. Perhaps they need to smash records and see their names on the top of every list.

I need garlic.

I need to be completely unplugged from everything with my hands in the dirt. I need something to throw myself into that isn’t work. I need a place where my kids and I can play without pings, rings, and bleeps from my phone. I need something that slowly rises from the ground and takes its sweet old time to fully develop.

When I practice the Examen each evening, I’ve noticed that gardening is often one of the most restorative things I do throughout the spring, summer, and fall. In the winter it’s often reading a book—preferably something on soul care or spirituality.

These aren’t the sorts of things you necessarily do to dominate the world and to become number one.

After a season of treating my work as my most important investment, I’ve learned that caring for my soul is actually tops on that list. If I can set some boundaries around my work, family, and personal time, I’ll gradually cultivate health in my soul and my family.

My work as a writer used to crush my soul because I tied my personal identity to my career success, and so I sacrificed everything to save “myself.” I suppose we’re all just trying to save ourselves most days. Perhaps we’re distracting ourselves from the fact that we’re losing ourselves.

I need space to pray, read, build, grow, create, and love. I need to take small steps every single day to remind myself that I’m running this race to win it, but the race is to experience a love that is deeper than I could imagine, to use my talents well, and to become a healthier person for the benefit of those around me.

That brings us back to garlic.

This is slow, steady work. It’s nourishing and fulfilling in its own right, but it’s not flashy and it’s not going to help us dominate the world. That last point is perhaps the most important reason why most of us need to grow garlic.

This post was adapted from Write Without Crushing Your Soul: Sustainable Publishing and Freelancing, which is on a limited time sale for $1.99. Find it here: Kindle | Nook | iBooks

Photo by Lukas Kubicek

The alternative to controlling my children

by Ed Cyzewski

By the second week of vacation, I had long given up on sleeping in – much less sleeping through the night. Up at 6:00 am one morning, I just needed to keep our one-year-old occupied for an hour while my wife’s family slept.

How hard could that be?

He banged everything he could find on the kitchen floor, hollered through breakfast, and whined as I bounced him around the house in my arms.

“Shhh! Shhh!” I said to him over and over again, as if that would make a difference.

I panicked. What should I do with him?

I let him slap at the large mirror in the dining room, held his hands as he wobbled on his unsteady legs, and held him upside down. Everything resulted in loud noises and more shushing.

It just wasn’t my morning. When a baby needs sleep, there’s no replacing it.

By the time I handed him over to my wife, I realized that I’d let myself become extremely stressed out. Mind you, this is our second born, and I spend quite a bit of time at home with our kids during the week. I’m not the bumbling greeting card dad who can’t figure out where to stick the bottle when the baby’s crying.

Still, I frequently make the mistake of trying to control my kids, especially when there’s no chance of ever winning. A tired baby is destined to cry for the first hour of the day. I gave in to anxiety because I couldn’t control the amount of noise he made.

Isn’t control one of the main battles throughout all of parenthood? It sure felt like that when I was a teenager and young adult.

When I was in high school, I wanted to attend a youth group at a Baptist church, and my Catholic mother tried to stop me – I went anyway, and eventually attended seminary.

When I was in my final year of college, I fell head over heels in love with a girl, and my dad said I should focus on my career instead of marriage – we got engaged a few months, later and have been happily married ever since.

As their grips tightened over my life choices, I slipped away from them for a season (before reconciling a few years later). I don’t think they anticipated that their attempts to control my faith and relationships would result in me shutting them out of those parts of my life and choosing my own path without their input.

If a teenager finds life with God through a youth group Bible study instead of high church liturgy, there’s nothing a parent can do to change that.

If a college student thinks he’s found the one, a parent can’t stop the sparks of that relationship, especially from 660 miles away.

Now, as a father to young children, I feel smaller gaps emerging each time I try to control them beyond the bounds of reason: “Drink your water now!” “Share with your brother!” “Stop nagging me!” I can relate to my parents a little bit more each day as I navigate conflict and my own control issues with our boys. I want to dictate what’s best, rather than starting where they are.

And if a baby is sleep deprived, there’s nothing a parent can do to minimize the noise of an unhappy child. If our one-year-old woke up the rest of the house during vacation, it wasn’t from my lack of trying. My anxiety and attempts at controlling his behavior certainly didn’t make things better.

Photo by Richard Masoner

A few days later, we were home, and the kids were sleep deprived from the drive the day before. Neither of our kids slept well in the car. We put the one-year-old to bed early, but he was still over-tired—screaming and arching his body as I held him.

I felt the anxiety coming over me, shouting in my head: “You need to make him quiet now! He’ll wake up his brother in the next room! What if your neighbor goes to bed early?! Hurry! Make him quiet!”

As I struggled to pray about this, I suddenly had a picture in my mind that I was a sponge, absorbing his sadness rather than fighting or controlling it. I tried to let his sadness pass through me rather than wringing it out of him.

I watched him cry, red-faced and waving his fists, as I rocked him. He passed from sleep, to crying, back to sleep, and then back to crying. All the while I gently whispered, “Shhhhhh” to him, rather than the demanding “Shh!” of vacation.

After a few minutes of crying and writhing from side to side in his crib, he drifted off to sleep with his arms stretched over his head. His chest lifted up and down ever so slightly as his exhaustion slipped away into the quiet of sleep.

I shuffled out of the room, tired but finally at peace with my child and, at least for a moment, with myself.

Why we avoid self-reflection, even though it’s good for us

by Ed Cyzewski

You don’t have to be determined to avoid self-reflection these days. Most of us carry app-filled smart phones in our pockets to provide constant stimulation and distraction. Binge-watching shows on Netflix, social media, and even books all offer a ready escape from being alone with ourselves. Podcasts were my favorite way to avoid self-reflection until I tried going without them for a single walk two years ago.

After watching my productivity and free time slump for months, thanks to the two-hour walks our son required for a morning nap (believe me, we tried everything else), I had a break-through plan. I decided to ditch podcasts and use my walks to either think of fresh writing ideas or pray.

Mind you, I love podcasts. I hardly did anything without a podcast two years ago. I believed I was on the brink of a productivity explosion. I set off on my walk and promptly drove myself crazy with worry. Questions darted every which way in my mind:

• What did my new client really think of me?
• Would he even pay on time?
• What about that next book project? Would the editor go for it?
• Will people actually want to read it?
• Do people even take me seriously as an author?
• Who am I kidding? I’m going down in flames.
• What if we go broke?
• Do I need to find a new career?
• What would I put on my resume?

After this quick descent into white knuckling anxiety that left me short of breath alongside an ironically tranquil river, I opted to return to my podcasts for the next walk. In fact, the podcasts were just one of the many ways I avoided being alone with my thoughts.

Why we medicate through distraction

When I finally turned off my podcasts, here’s what I discovered: I desperately need self-reflection, but I avoid it. Here are a few reasons why:

It’s easier to watch other people reflect on themselves: Sign me up for an afternoon watching other people bare their souls on Facebook. It’s far more difficult to turn my gaze inward.

Distractions are good by themselves: We can always tell ourselves there’s nothing wrong with using a smart phone, watching television, or listening to podcasts. However, too much time devoted to these things may leave little space for self-reflection.

We fear there’s no cure for our fears: It was terrible to finally face my anxiety and fears. When I talked with my wife and a few trusted friends about the things I uncovered during my walk, I realized that a big contributor to my resistance was the fear that I couldn’t change anything.

We’re genuinely busy: My life back then was full, and with another kid added to the pack, it’s even crazier now. Self-reflection demands sacrifices and changes to our schedules. It has to be a conscious choice.

We don’t see how it could help: When I first set out on my walks, I didn’t see how self-reflection could actually help. However, I now recognize the sources of my anxieties and worries, and I’m learning ways to deal with them.

We don’t know where to begin: Although I started out well-intentioned on that first walk, I could have used structure or guidance for my self-reflection. Even if we know that self-reflection could help us and we’re prepared to make time to deal with the worries and concerns bubbling beneath the surface, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Cultivating Self-Reflection

It has taken a lot of trial and error to find healthy practices of self-reflection. I now use the spiritual exercise known as the Examen (via the “Examine” app) as a guide to self-reflection.

When I take walks, I pay attention to my body. Am I gripping the stroller tightly? Am I short of breath? Am I clenching my teeth? If so, then I need to explore my thoughts, especially through free writing or journaling. Why is a certain topic causing these reactions?

Awareness of my body’s physical signs of anxiety helps me stop in order to ask probing questions about the root causes of anxiety. Rather than just assuming my anxiety must have a reasonable basis, I assume that some probing questions will help, especially if I seek out a friend’s counsel later.

Lastly, I often resort to either reciting prayers or centering prayer throughout my day—the latter is typically a single word that I use to center my thoughts on God’s presence. You don’t have to pray if that’s not your thing, but I’ve found that left to my own devices, my mind can wander to the worst-case scenario in no time. These prepared words offer a sanctuary of sorts and redirect my thoughts to healthy places.

How do you practice self-reflection? Is there one particular barrier that keeps you from it?

This post was adapted from Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together. The $.99 pre-order sale ends March 10, 2015. The price goes up to $1.99 for its release on March 11-13. Order your copy here:
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Ed Cyzewski

Why we medicate through distraction

Cultivating Self-Reflection