Of A Comment, An Orchard, and Changing Things

Last week in a post at FOTB's (Friend Of This Blog) blog Eaton Rapids Joe, a commenter made a response which made me stop in my mental tracks (reformatted for purposes of review):

"I just turned 66, went to a new Dr for a checkup.  He asked about my daily activities.

I explained I start at 0800, water at least one orchard, weed, replant, do maintenance etc.  The next day another orchard.  I have 300 fruit and nut trees planted and 800 in pots.

He told me hand watering was wasteful of my time.  I thought about the old saying, 'the best fertilizer is the footprint of the orchardist."

I told him that I had already spent my life trying to change people and the world and now I just wanted to grow food trees and in my book it certainly isn't a waste. (Ed. note:  Emphasis mine.)

He stayed quiet after that."

It made me stop in my mental tracks because the bold section was a thought that I had been struggling with and not able to give voice to.

If I am honest with myself, this has been the way things have been running together over the last few months - really, the last year more or less since our relocation.  Partially it manifested itself simply in the fact that with the change in location came a change in how I spent my time.  Partially it manifested itself - well, maybe a lot of manifesting following the recent election - by a greater and greater withdrawal from social media first and then most news and now blogs that generally dwell on  - as the commenter noted above - "trying to change people and change the world".

Combine that with what has been becoming clearer and clearer in terms of the fact that really my career is God's "calling" on my life and the focus I am finding on an ever decreasing list of activities to focus on (largely driven by the book Essentialism and improved by making myself blog about it to understand it), and suddenly my life seems very little about the "greater things" of the age.

One of the books I picked up recently at the recommendation in a book which I cannot now recall (Cal Newport?  Rod Dreher?) is the book The Intellectual Life:  Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.. It is a dense book and I am slowly reading through it, but one of the ideas he writes of is that God calls us to solitude, but not isolation:  "As lifegiving as is solitude, so paralyzing and sterilizing is isolation". 

I am largely a introvert - at least by how I recharge my energy, if not by how I seem to engage people - and have always had buried in me that someday I would just "get away" from it all.  But that is not the point, suggests Sertillanges:  yes, we need solitude, but solitude within the larger context of being in people.

I realize as I write this these seem to be two entirely different streams of thought - one on doing things that matter even to one's self and not "worrying" about changing people or the world, the other on the idea solitude versus isolation - but I think they have a common item.  And that perhaps is simply doing the things that we are given to do (by God in my case) outside of any greater social or civilizational context.

Another FOTB and the blog's resident optimist Ed from Riverbend Journal has made the comment more than once that for he, and I, and likely most of the readers of our blogs, the ability to impact "the world" is beyond us at this point.  The torch of decisional destiny has largely passed to the younger generations; we are in a different stage of life.  And it had struck me - before the comment at the start of this post - how relatively freeing a statement that is.  

The blogs I follow - they are all listed over there to the right, with one or two exceptions that post enough on political views that while I enjoy them, they are outside the bounds here - are almost completely consumed with people who are living lives which, by the world's standards, would be considered "small".  They are generally folks that are small homesteaders or retired folks (or both) that are simply living their lives and doing the things they feel important:  gardening, raising livestock, woodworking and carpentry, weaving, creating a comfortable home, posting pictures of flowers, writing fiction and writing about history and writing ponderings on life.   But if I think about such blogs, I realize that they have one thing that binds them:  they do (and write about what they do) from and for a love of the things that they do.

Not one of them writes about changing people or changing the world - but  they have come to change at least one person and one person's world:  my own as I have read them and come to know them over the years.

The commenter on ERJ's blog remains, sadly, anonymous.  But I remain grateful to them for helping to push me to a clarity that I have been struggling through but never arrived at: simply by doing that to which we feel called we can both change people and change the world through the solitude of those actions in a world that does not seem to see them.

And by doing so - whether in leaving an orchard or trees or works that pass to others or simply by the example of our lives - we leave people and the world a better place.