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Paying Attention - the Most Important Skill on Your Farm

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by Sheri Dixon

Congratulations. You are a homesteader.

I think our society has it backwards. The assumption is that because our brains are so big, and capable of processing and storing so much information, that we need to throw huge amounts of data at it at all times to keep us "sharp". 

Bigger, brighter, louder, is better in such an ever-growing cacophony of sense-numbing images and sounds that it’s a wonder we aren’t all on the ground having sensory overload seizures.

Maybe, just maybe

Our brains are large to be able to soak up details. Tiny little things that make a huge difference to our lives and our souls.

I have a seven-year-old son. This boy is a whirling dervish of constant motion and noise. During the day I see him mostly just out of my line of vision, speeding from one activity to the next. The world is a gigantic treasure chest crying out for discovery, and a mere mother cannot get in the way.

Ah, but at night, when the day has taken it’s toll on the boy, when he’s fought sleep as long as possible and finally fallen in a heap to dream of dragons and pirates, he’s there for me to see.  Not just to check if he’s covered, or taken some sort of amphibian to bed with him, but to see.  Every parent knows what I mean. You sit on the edge of the bed, in the quiet murk of night and you etch every line of that face into your memory - the freckles, the terminal bed-head, the chin and eyebrows so like his father’s, every detail.  And I defy any parent to deny bending forward in the dark and inhaling the scent of their offspring’s head - clean from the bath, or still filled with sunshine and sand from the day’s adventures, that too is driven into your memory base.  Because the details are what you hold onto not only during his waking hours when he’s traveling so fast all you catch is a blur, but forever.

Life is in the details.

Too much of life denies the details. We’re too busy, we’re late, and we can’t waste TIME.

My daughter lives and works in Washington DC and recently sent me an article. I’ll add the link to it at the bottom of this page if you’d like to read it for yourself. The Post did a little experiment to find out just how imprisoned within our own busy-ness we all are.  They got a world-class violinist to set up wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt in the Metro - his open violin case for tips normally holds his Stradivarius violin. He did not play popular tunes that may have niggled someone’s brain enough for them to pause - he played classical pieces. Beautiful classical pieces by a world-class violinist playing a priceless instrument. 

A few paused. A few tossed some coins into his case without even slowing down. Most didn’t even look.  An artist whose concerts sell out at over $100 per seat collected $37 plus change during rush hour in our nation’s capitol.

This is part of the wonderment of living a rural lifestyle.

While a lot of the world is planning for the future, today slips away, never to return.  A homesteader must be intimately familiar with the present, or lose everything and be left with no future.  And once your brain is trained to look for details instead of the grand expanses, your horizons are limitless.

You can’t check your goats without smiling at the kids frolicking. You can’t eye your chickens without studying their social order. Try to examine your garden without smelling the earth. Mentally noting the position of the sun leaves you looking directly at the clouds (and yes, that one DOES look like a bunny).

Paying attention to the details does not exclude planning for the future; it encompasses our plans for the future. For we are planning not only for ourselves and our families, but also for everything in our care- up to and including the very land we are living on. Every decision is weighed and thought through with attention to the details of the co-operation of everything and everyone that decision will affect.

Because that’s what we do - we co-habit, co-mingle and co-operate our homesteads with literally millions of other living things, most of them not just benign, but absolutely integral to the fate of our endeavors.

“"For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail."
  --  Benjamin Franklin

On your homestead, paying attention to details will decrease what you will have to pay to the Veterinarian, the hardware store, and people to come in to fix something that got mucked up due to negligence. The physical safety and well being of your place is reason enough to train yourself to hone in on the details.

Learning to absorb the peripheral images, sounds, textures and aromas is gravy.

And everyone loves gravy.

 (the aforementioned article) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

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