Cultivate the Garden of Your Life

A teacher is a gardener who plants seeds in the minds and hearts of their students. Some are receptive to the teacher and, like fertile soil, produce the fruit of action and achievement. Others are more receptive to the popular culture, which plants the seeds of sloth, pride, envy, gluttony, lust, and other deadly vices that grow into weeds that choke anything the teacher has planted.

This parable of the seeds is nothing new. Christians have been reading it for centuries. The parable itself is a seed of truth that contains within it, in condensed form, an entire philosophy of living that could take up several volumes. No doubt, some people have written a book about this and other parables.

But the most important book is the one you write with your thoughts, feelings, and actions -- the book of your life. It contains the flowers, plants, and trees of the good seeds sowed by your teachers: parents, relatives, educators, authors, masters, and other positive influential people. And it contains the bad seeds planted by agents of the popular culture.

At a certain point in your life, you have to do a life review (preferably not a the moment of death) and edit the book of life you're composing. You need to delete the wrong ideas and bad habits, the mistakes and awkwardness. You can't go back and redo what you've done wrong, but you can erase it's effects through forgiveness and reparation. This is one of the 12 steps of AA.

The 12 steps are not just for alcoholics and other addicts but for everyone, for we all have addictions from the weed seeds that have been planted in our minds and hearts. So, use the 12 steps to cultivate your garden, edit your book, and produce something that nourishes others. And when you reach the end of your life, may you leave behind some good seeds in the receptive minds of your grandchildren and other children that will grow into the same fruit that you produced. In this way, civilizations evolve generation after generation, garden after garden, book after book.