Gardening Metaphor

This metaphor is from the book Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change (Hayes, et al., 1999).

Today I want to share it with you because it is a text I return to from time to time and it helps me to reflect on the daily decisions I make, to connect with what I value, to accept the vicissitudes of the road and to choose where to invest my efforts. Here it is…

Let's imagine that we have a garden and that we are the only ones responsible for taking care of it. We are the gardener of our garden.

Plants symbolise what we have in life. If we observe, we can see the plants we have: from work, from family, from friends, from hobbies, from our body...

When we see our garden we can begin to ask ourselves many questions:

Are all plants equally cared for? Which ones are more limp and need our attention more? Is the number of plants in our garden adequate? If we have too many plants, it may be impossible to dedicate the time they need to them. And if we have few, and due to inclement weather some wither, we will be left with a very poor garden.

In addition to plants, in our garden there are also some seeds that we have planted. They are our objectives. Why have we chosen these seeds and not others? It is probably because we want to have a garden like our neighbor's, perhaps because it has been suggested to us too strongly by the people around us, or perhaps because we really want the plants that will sprout from them. What is our case?

Plant growth takes time. Many gardeners become impatient, they begin to plant more seeds to see if, unlike those already planted, plants sprout from them more quickly. However, newly planted seeds, like all seeds, they all take time to become leafy plants.

With their strategy, they end up with a garden where they have planted many seeds, but from which they have not obtained any plants because they have not cared for them with patience. Are we patient gardeners?

Many gardeners, when they plant a seed, imagine all the details of the plant. How it will grow and when they observe that the shape or color of the flowers…or the number of leaves are not exactly as they had anticipated, they begin to believe that they have chosen the wrong plant or that perhaps they have not done their job correctly. Others, however, observe their plants and appreciate and enjoy those little surprises of nature. Are we desperate when things do not meet our expectations?

Weeds also live in our garden. These symbolize our fears, our insecurities, our doubts, our complexes. There are gardeners who spend all their time trying to pull out weeds and neglect the rest of their plants. The more they try to pull them out, the worse off the rest of their plants are. All gardens have weeds. If it were not so, it would be so artificial that we would see it unreal.

Do we spend more time obsessing over weeds or watering our plants?

From the book: Hayes, et al. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. The Guilford Press.