I’m having this parenting-type dilemma lately, maybe some of you can relate. complaints surrounding the chore of mowing and the time it consumes in my already busy week are a somewhat common vein in my repartee of conversation. My caring and helpful circle of friends and relatives recommend I pass this mundane task along to my daughter. We were, after all, taking on this and even greater responsibilities at her age.

“So what’s the problem?” you might ask. I think I’m the one who’s not ready to let it go. The plan and simple truth is that I LIKE mowing. There; I’ve said it out loud, I’ve admitted it. I complain at times but with only a half-hearted commitment to the whining. mowing has always been a sort of “Zen” place of peace for me, right from the beginning. There’s that almost, but not quite deafening white noise blocking out, not only sounds, but most of your thoughts, leaving behind an empty page with which to imagine, create, or de-stress, in effect: meditate.

when we were kids, we used headphones while we cut the endless acres of lawn. I would be able to listen to my music without another sibling interrupting, initiating a volume war or taunting me with challenges that my taste in music was crap. Hours spent alone with only my choice of music or my voice in my head were cherished moments in a family with 9 kids.

Even now it’s a place and time where I can think things through, go through the events of the day in peace, and sometimes just admire the environment that surrounds me without TV or other human voices invading my thought process. There’s something about the concentric circles, the two-tone, parallel lines, the undeniable completion of a job that clarifies one’s acceptance of an imperfect world. It’s the mindfulness of these daily experiences that is at the core of meditation, as I understand it, this leads to enlightenment. I’ll bet you didn’t know you could get all of that from a job well done out there on the green.

I come across this “stress reliever” toy in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog every now and then and it kind of reminds me of the grass-cutting-zen-experience. It’s a small, personal sandbox that you can keep on your desk and it comes with a rake and some sort of tiny hoe. The idea is that you take time to sit and “draw” lines in the sand to calm your nerves or you “draw” circles to “center” yourself. People pay a lot of money for those little, tiny sandboxes, in order to “find their inner peace”. Personally, I’d rather get the same effect from mowing my lawn with the added bonus of actually accomplishing something, rather than just sitting and playing with a GI Joe-sized hoe and rake in a miniature cat litter box at my desk. That might be what is holding me back from becoming a successful entrepreneur/businessperson….but it’s difficult to say.

Letting go might be an additional key to enlightenment and I, obviously, need to work on that. I’m coming to the realization that a “tween” will not willingly volunteer to do anything. However, they aren’t so far gone into their inevitable, teen aged, hormonal craziness that they won’t do what you tell them to do….just yet. If I took her out there and handed over the pull start/key to my mowing machine, I’m sure she would do a wonderful job but I’m not so sure she would appreciate the solitude and the time for meditation. It would just be another annoying chore for her and I still view that as a waste of a good mow. So I will continue to take advantage of this time in the summer….maybe I’ll come up with a doozy of an article some time this month while I follow my mower….that’s what I should be thinking about rather than focusing on my own inner peace….there are those of you out there that might whole-heartedly agree.