The Garden Metaphor

One of the most important things… No, let me correct that. THE most important thing you can do to better yourself, your self-control, and the effect you have on the world - both for its benefit and for yours - is to learn and accept the concept I call “Being in Your Garden,” based on a metaphor I’ve used with some modicum of success to describe this concept to others.

It goes like this: imagine yourself sitting in a garden. - not a vegetable or flower garden, but a castle garden, a wide open space designed specifically for the peaceful enjoyment of its occupants. All around this space is a high stone wall that divides and protects the garden from the outside world. This garden is your self. The wall represents the boundary surrounding the things that you can control in your life. For everything that’s inside your garden walls, you have complete authority. You are the monarch and your word is law. If you’d like a silver willow tree to be placed by the north wall, you and only you get to have it done. If you’d like a meandering gravel path by a babbling brook, it’s yours. You get to decide every plant, pathway and bench in the place, and, importantly, it is and should be designed just for you. Because you are the garden’s only occupant. No one else, no other being in the entire world, can enter your garden or has any ability to change what is inside. It is your safe space and the area where you reign supreme.

And just as importantly, it is the only area that you control. Anything outside your garden walls is either a space that is someone else’s garden (where they reign supreme, and you have no power), or is the no man’s land between gardens where you and others have influence, but not control. As important as it is for you to feel safe and powerful inside your garden, it is equally important that you recognize where your garden boundaries lie and the limit of your power’s reach. Nothing will make you sadder or more fearful than believing you don’t have control over your own life, and nothing will be more infuriating than trying to exert control you don’t have over someone else’s.

So where exactly is this boundary around our garden? It lies squarely on a definitive and clear line. Your garden - the one and only area over which you have full and total control - is a list of exactly four things: your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, and your decisions.

Your thoughts are the product of what Freud might have called the conscious mind, or is sometimes referred to as the Left Brain. This is where your inner monologue lives, though, importantly, it is much more than just your inner monologue. It is also where you picture items - either remembered or imagined, imagine or predict possible futures, where you struggle to puzzle something out, or where you try to understand something new. It is most likely the place that feels the most like the real you (though that’s somewhat of an illusion, as there are other parts of your mind that are just as much a part of you). It is fairly easy to see how we have control over our thoughts. After all, only we decide what we think about, and obviously no one has access to force us to think anything. But sometimes we do forget that. Like when someone hurls an insult at us, and we decide to accept that nasty thing they’ve said about us, and that hurts. It’s easy to blame the other person (and certainly, their intent in this scenario is to harm), but in reality, their words would bounce right off us if we didn’t decide to accept what they’re saying and think it ourselves. And in doing so we try to shift the blame for our feelings onto them, instead of on ourselves for accepting what they said about us and letting it enter our thoughts and agreeing with them, which is what actually hurts (usually by hitting our Identity).

Beliefs, on the other hand, are the purview of your unconscious or Right Brain. This is what you know deep down, even if you can’t explain how or why you know it. These are not as easily changed as your thoughts, and it requires a bit of a process to change them, either intentionally or accidentally. So while you do have total control, that fact is not as obvious until you learn how to do it.

Emotions can similarly seem like they are outside your control. The reason it seems that way is because truly controlling your emotions (as opposed to just pretending they aren’t there) is also a skill that has to be both understood and developed. We are all controlling our emotions, but like a toddler on a computer keyboard, we’re mostly just mashing buttons and seeing results with no knowledge of what we’re doing, so the results can seem chaotic and random. Once you learn the (mechanics), however, you’ll find that you can control them and - true to this premise - no one else can.

Your Decisions, or perhaps more helpfully described as your intent to act, are the primary purpose and function of who you are as a human. It is the one principle that defines us and around which our whole sense of self and our consensus of society is based. It is where you are the most you. And while your Thoughts and Beliefs and Emotions are things that happen, your Decisions are what you do. This can be mental, such as deciding you are going to stop thinking of yourself as a loser, or can manifest in the physical world with some lesser but not insignificant efficacy - depending on how far you reach - such as when you decide to go to the ice cream shop (other things can conspire to prevent you from achieving your goal, but the decision to make the attempt is yours entirely), or when you decide you’re going to start your own ice cream business. Also important is that you only control the decision to act. You do not control the outcome. If I decide to hit a home run off a major league pitcher, that’s something that is really hard to do. All I can really do is try to time my decision, and influence my muscles to try to swing the bat in exactly the right way so it intercepts the ball in the right way to send it over the outfield fence. But there are a thousand other factors that I don’t control - how the pitcher gripped the ball, how he moved his arm to throw it, the humidity and density of the air and the minute flexibility of the bat as I swing it. Any combination of these factors can prevent what I want to happen from happening, as well as my own mispredictions of where the ball is going to be when it crosses home plate. And this ignores the thousand decisions it would require for me to even make it into a Major League Baseball game in the first place. On the other hand, if I decide to scratch my own ass, there are very few outside factors that are likely to prevent that. Even so, it is the decision to act that you control, not the eventual outcome. That’s important.

Now notice that while I said you have total control over everything in your garden, I did not say your control is instantaneous or without effort. If you want a sprawling oak tree with an ornate stone bench in the shade beneath, in the real world, you can’t just pop that into existence. The same is often true within the Garden of your mind. It may take time and effort to achieve the results you want. You have to plant the sapling, and start carving the stone. You have to nurture the tree and remove competition, and you have to design and put in the work to create the bench. There is work to be done to achieve the results you want. The point, however is that no one else is granted access to harm your sapling but you, and no one else can lay a chisel on your creation. It is yours and yours alone.

Also of note is what is not on the list. Anything that is your Thoughts, Beliefs, Emotions, or Decisions is yours to control. Anything that is not on that list is not. Perhaps the most interesting or troubling omission from the list is your own body. Things that are in your garden, you control absolutely and with autonomy. Things that are in someone else’s garden you have not a single electron’s worth of control over. But there is a swath of “things” that exist in the Universe that fall into no one’s garden, and are thus subject to the influence of any number of people who are using their decisive power to take action in the Universe. And as galling as it is for us to think this way, our own body is not something we control in totality. Someone with more upper body strength than us can force us into a van, or can tackle us and take us to the ground against our will. With the appropriate application of electricity or a tap on a reflex point, another person can cause our body to take action without our consent, and in some conditions such as Parkinson’s or paralysis, our body on its own just refuses to do what we tell it to do. So while it is true that for the most part, we have more influence over our body than anyone else, it doesn’t qualify as being within the boundary of our garden where we are the omnipotent monarch.

Another absentee which you might be unhappy about is that which other people think about us or what they say to or about us. Those are the thoughts and decisions that belong in someone else’s garden, and while we can not like them (what we think about their opinion is our opinion and is ours to control), we have no ability to change or control what is in other people’s gardens, just as they cannot control what is in our. We could lay out a series of words that make a compelling argument in the hopes that they change their mind, or we can say words or take actions that we expect will cause them pain in the hopes that they will submit and do what we tell them to do. But in the end, they make those decisions, and we have no true control over that outcome at all. That may not feel great, but when you can let it go and accept that it’s outside your control, there’s a peace that comes with knowing your own limitations, and even more in knowing that their thoughts or words are theirs, and you don’t have to accept them or believe them yourself, because that is in your garden.

So, Being in Your Garden is actually a combination of two different mental positions or reminders, both complementary and correlative of the principles laid out above. To be in your garden, you must own and accept the things that are in your control - stop blaming other people for how you feel or for your own decisions - and to own and accept other people’s right and autonomy to make their own decisions and have their own thoughts, emotions, and beliefs - stop trying to control other people, even if itis “about” you or affects things that are important to you. “Own” in this case means to truly accept it into the deepest part of you (into your Belief System, in fact) to the point where there is no question or resistance in your mind that it is true. Accomplish just these two changes in yourself, and you will magnify your own power, happiness, and clarity of purpose by tenfold. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that most people fail at this principle, and consequently and to the extent of their failure, they experience the deepest misery a person can know. Those that have mastered these principles however, are the most powerful, self-posessed people you know, for the sole reason that they are expending the same amount of energy that we all are, but are spending it only on the things that they can actually change instead of throwing it away by spitting at a brick wall.