Weeding the Path to Enlightenment

I didn't go to work today. It was too hot. And i was too tired. Manual work is culturally regarded as "good for the soul" and were I to believe in such a concept, I might find it so. But it is tiring for the body. MY step count shows as approaching or exceeding 20000 steps a day fairly consistently, most of this carrying or pushing some article of garden machinery. As a job, it is very good at finding out those injuries you thought had healed twenty years ago or more - in my case a torn rotator cuff ligament that really does not like me cutting hedges.
And so, it was a sunny day and the man was due to come to sort out the misbehaving internet so I decided I could afford not to do any work today. Well, the internet didn't really get fixed, but I did mend my puncture and go out on my mountain bike in some local woods which was glorious.

Thought must be given to the problem however: Injury. When we are young, we do stupid, crazy, catastrophic things, fully believing that any damage will be temporary and will heal in a given amount of time allowing us to carry on with our lives and activities. Well, it isn't so. That broken wrist from 1994, that sprained ankle that beset you in 1989, they caused you grief for some months certainly, but you had faith that in a while, an unspecified but finite amount of time, you would be up and running again and it would all be a comedic episode to refer to when anecdotes were being exchanged over future beer or coffee. And it seemed to be the case. Bodies heal, don't they?
One day, twenty or thirty years later, you reach for the salt, not a risky undertaking in itself, and a sudden twinge in your should makes you wince, reminding you of a long-forgotten pain which you thought you had seen the last of. The next morning, you can't put your socks on. In the shower, washing your hair requires your "good" hand to help lift the other unwilling hand to your head in order to get a good later and not have half a head of clean hair like some 1970s shampoo advert.
And so it goes. Weeks later, it still hurts and your own mortality and fragility are brought into sharp focus: Insults to your body accumulate. The body does not forget.
Oh, I am sure that I will find a way to manage to do my job with a complaining shoulder joint. But it sets a time limit to the job. This chapter in the strange and varied course of my life will by necessity be short lived.
Well, that's ok. Whilst there might be a perceived dignity in honest physical toil, it is pretty dull. In Siddartha, by Herman Hess, the rich Brahmin merchant gives up his fortune to become an ascetic. Ultimately, he becomes a ferryman and lives a simple life of contemplation, listening to the opinions of the river day in day out. And I am sure this is all very spiritual but after a while surely didn't he just get bored? Of course, he is a fictional character and as such has few limits on the credibility of his responses. He could as the narrative unfolds transcend to Nirvana if the author wished it so. I cannot. The only author in this story is me and the only character I have any control over is myself. I suspect spiritual transcendence will not result from weeding.

Weeding is tiresome. I do an awful lot of weeding. Other people say "I like weeding. It is satisfying. It lets me go into a flow." That may well be, but my goodness does it lack an intellectual dimension! How does one take a brain which enjoys an active life of the mind and expect it to remain happy with tedious exertion and without intellectual stimulus?

Of course, there are certainly simple pleasures and small instances of beauty; a bee entering a foxglove, a patch of cleared ground, ants busily carrying disproportionately huge loads. But after a while even these cease to be very interesting. There are only so many ants you can watch before you have seen most of what ants are likely to do.Plus insects bite me a lot. But I digress.
So yes, this cannot be more than an interlude, a pause for reflection, a change of perspective. A research project perhaps.
But what then? As Zen calmness descends from the repetitive toil and the mind falls quiet like a prairie with tufts of rustling grass but no other sound, how does one not turn into something akin to the vegetables one cultivates? Serenity is all very well, but eventually it becomes stultifying to the point you forget how to talk to people.
I plan on continuing to work as a gardener for a year. After that, I may continue do some of my more interesting jobs and visit those clients who I have grown fond of, but effectively, I shall retire. My impecunious state will not be quite so acute after that as certain humble plans will come to fruition. So, I shall regard this few years as my own ascetic phase and move on with such enlightenment as I can interpret and post-rationalise.
In the meantime, I must endeavour to find the time (not easy at this time of rampant Spring growth) to tap out these small missives in an attempt to remind myself that once I had an extensive vocabulary, even if it rarely gets used these days, and an intellect which used to run fast and effortlessly over vast landscapes of the mind, surprising myself and occasionally others. I suppose it is still there to be uncovered? Do such faculties wither and atrophy beyond recovery? I suppose I shall either be delighted or disappointed.
But it would appear that the nobility of working with the soil is not as healthy for the mind as it is for the plants. And so some extra fertiliser and trace nutrients are required if my own growth is to match that of my herbaceous perennials.