Deadhead

I’ve recently gotten into gardening. I didn’t think I’d like it, but I do. Our last house had no garden or yard, only a pathway. I didn’t mind. Gardening! Yawn! Hassle! But when we moved we gained a small garden; small and manageable. I wasn’t going to like it anyway, so the less to do the better. I don’t have “green fingers” so all the plants would die anyway. But I’ve found it’s so much fun to see things you’ve planted grow up. It’s interesting to watch the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of life. There are so many different plants and flowers, and they (theoretically) need to be looked after differently.  

One thing that scared me was deadheading and pruning. I didn’t like the idea of removing dying flowers because I wanted to see their colour for as long as possible. What I didn’t realise was that removing dead flowers allows new ones to replace them! And pruning – but I might kill the plant! Pruning does many things like removing dead wood, shaping, encouraging growth. And I suppose if I did kill a plant I could just buy a new one….

You might think this post is about gardening making you happy. Well no, it’s not. It’s about deadheading and pruning in our lives. There are things which make us unhappy, yet strangely we don’t always want to get rid of them. I suggest we need to take a look at them and decide if we can deadhead or prune them out of our lives in order to encourage new growth or to give us time to replace them with something else we’d rather do. Hence – the happiness audit! This will seem to be a chore, but for one week only take a pen and some sheets of paper (if you still use such things) and each HOUR (yes, hour!) write down the MAIN thing you did in that hour; then on a scale of 1 to 10, rate how much sense of achievement you got and also how much you enjoyed it. This will be a good way to assess what you do and don’t like doing as you do it. It’ll give you a template to deadhead activities you don’t like to allow more time for things you do. A word of caution – be sensible. If you discover you hate washing up, you shouldn’t decide you’ll never do it again. Either find a way to enjoy it or buy a dishwasher! If you don’t like your job, don’t just walk away. Some things we just have to do. So see if there’s anything you don’t like doing that you don’t HAVE to do. Ditch it and try replacing it with something you’ve always wanted to try.

It may seem hard to give up things which don’t make us happy. It can hurt and create a feeling of emptiness. But allow something else to grow in its place and it will seem very worthwhile.

For example, I’ve stopped avidly watching news and political programmes (all doom, gloom and negativity) and now I do other things like writing poetry, playing my ukulele more often, writing blogs! Let’s sensibly prune off dead wood from our lives to allow fresh, new growth to come through.