Unexpected Overlaps

(Photo of organic farming at Kampia Cyprus from Flickr)

I thought I would get farther into this month before my schedule for writing posts would suffer. Alas, no such luck. Obligations piled in, shoving aside my writing time.

In the midst of it all, a small eureka moment slipped through.

It came from an email conversation about agriculture and working on NASA missions, with a side serving of volunteering in the feminist movement. Those have something in common. It isn’t a peripheral detail. It’s central, essential.

To do well with any of those three endeavors, you need a long view. It has to be such a long view that the end goal might not be reached in your lifetime. You need the discipline and tenacity to carry on despite knowing the horizon is that far ahead. You’ve got to be able to find enough satisfaction in small milestones along the way to keep you going.

When you plant an orchard, it’s going to take years to achieve the first proper harvest. The same goes for a vineyard. Even if what you grow is something that crops once or twice a year, how you grow it profoundly affects how well you can grow it in the years ahead. You can farm in ways that nurture the soil, or you can focus on just one crop at a time and end up with soil too depleted to support crops any more.

It's the same attitude you need to go to the moon and beyond, abolish slavery, establish universal suffrage, advance civil rights, or save the world from climate change.

Farmers and rocket scientists are, in that respect, on the same wavelength.