On Spreadin’ It — life is as it is. Get­ting mad gets you nowhere, and noth­ing changes. Appre­ci­at­ing the polit­i­cal in the nat­ural makes sense.

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Some years ago I had a sec­ond office in Port Elgin, Ontario. My drive took me north from Men­non­ite coun­try, through other farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties, to Lake Huron. It was a lovely 2-hour drive.

I remem­ber one drive up that was cer­tainly a treat. The farm imple­ments were every­where and it was clearly time to pre­pare the fields for next year. In other words, as in many farm com­mu­ni­ties world wide, it was time to spread it.

And spread­ing it they were.

So, have you ever watched a manure spreader trundling through a field, scat­ter­ing manure in a 20 foot arc? Have you seen wag­ons filled with manure, head­ing for the fields, their con­tents to be dumped into the spreader? Or, I learned, if your manure of choice is pig manure (strong stuff!) you actu­ally don’t spread manure — you mix it with water and spray “manure tea.”

Even the skunks pack their bags and leave town.

I’m amazed at how “put out” non small town folk can get when it’s spreadin’ time. My mom, bless her, used to get right indig­nant when she’d come upon the fra­grance — which of course hangs in the air like brown fog, and some­times has enough punch to clear up your sinuses from your last cold. She’d say,

“Why do they (the infa­mous “they”) have to be doing this now? Don’t they know how bad it smells?”

I’d look at her and shake my head in wonderment.

It was clear that mom was really ask­ing, “Why are they doing this to me? Surely they should have known I’d be dri­ving along this road and that I would offend myself.” I’m sure, at her most self-involved, she fig­ured it was actu­ally a plot. “Psst. Erma’s com­ing. Spread it thick and pass the word.”

Well, maybe not.

As my ther­a­pist used to say, “Shit hap­pens.” (You knew I was going to have to say that, right?)

Not much that is hap­pen­ing in life is aimed directly “at” me. Indeed, most of life is sim­ply goes on with­out my notic­ing. Dar­bella and I took a night time nature walk a few weeks back. We’d be walk­ing along, using flash­lights, and the guide would shift his light, and poof! — an ani­mal or a taran­tula. Never noticed, even with a flashlight!

Which is another way of say­ing that the things that are sig­nif­i­cant in my life are the things I notice. And vice versa.

Added to that is the inter­pre­ta­tion I put on the few things I choose to notice. Exam­ple: If I’m look­ing to make myself mis­er­able, I’ll look for things I judge prove that I’m hard done by. If I’m look­ing for exam­ples of poor treat­ment, I’ll be an expert in ignor­ing any­thing else.

I can look at the manure spread­ers and see noth­ing but manure spread­ers, (like my mom did) or I can miss them entirely. I can be like a farmer and think, “Good! The crops will grow next year!” Or I can be put out, wrin­kle my nose and curse all farm­ers and the heav­ens for their incon­sid­er­ate behav­iour. A lot of peo­ple pick the lat­ter — and the manure is spread anyway.

Which is sort of like office pol­i­tics games. I’m amazed at how many peo­ple think a goal in busi­ness cir­cles is to elim­i­nate game play­ing, pol­i­tics and manip­u­lat­ing sit­u­a­tions, because they judge that such sit­u­a­tions “stink.”

“If things were ‘right,’ this wouldn’t be nec­es­sary” kind of think­ing. Well, get over it. All of life, at some level, is political.

I write this blog to get you to look at your life and how you are play­ing it, and I often do that by reveal­ing my expe­ri­ences to you. I’m not doing this to amuse myself. I’m doing this to have an impact and to facil­i­tate change. In myself, of course. But emphat­i­cally for you, too.

Is this polit­i­cal? Of course.

It’s polit­i­cal because I’m pro­mot­ing an agenda, a world-view, in all that I write and all that I do. I’m also (or I would be a hyp­ocrite) LIVING my agenda, my pol­i­tics, my world-view. Ide­ally, I want to be con­nected with peo­ple who are on the same page as me. My “agenda,” such as it is, is to have other peo­ple to talk to. Now, from my per­spec­tive, I’m doing this for noble rea­sons. But at the end of the day, all I can say is that I am doing what I am doing solely for MY rea­sons.

Farm­ers spread manure for a polit­i­cal rea­son. They want a good crop, in order to make more money than they spend. I don’t sus­pect many of them are sit­ting out there, hour after hour, on their trac­tors, drag­ging around manure spread­ers because they think this is a great way to spend a Wednes­day morn­ing. The manure, to them, is a means to an end. The “end” is mea­sured on their bot­tom line. (Yes, I get the puns.)

I’m sure more than a few yahoos yell and swear at them, shoot them the bird, etc. as they drive by. They likely grin and don’t take it per­son­ally, like the yahoos do.

I doubt there are many farmer’s meet­ings going on, debat­ing the rel­a­tive mer­its of manure spread­ing. I mean, pic­ture it:

“Well, Luke, what do you think? Maybe we should change our manure spread­ing habits. Sixty peo­ple got mad at me today.”

“Well, Rufus, I was think­ing the same thing. Here we are, impos­ing our manure on those poor dri­vers and the only rea­son we’re doing it is to pay our mort­gage. How could we be so selfish?”

“Yeah, guys,” replies Ted, a tear trick­ling down his cheek, “It’s my par­ent­ing. My par­ents were farm­ers and they spread their manure every­where, and it all landed on me. I’m a help­less vic­tim of my genes. I’m a manure spreader — I’ll always be a manure spreader. In fact, com­pared to you guys, you guys are saints. I’m the worst manure spreader on the planet.” (I think I actu­ally knew this “farmer…” )

A guy I knew worked for a world-class bozo. The boss was a racist, misog­y­nist, and a mis­ery to be around. My buddy was head of a major depart­ment and needed stuff to do his job. He’d go and ask and his boss would yell and swear and my buddy would leave empty handed. After a month of this, my friend showed up and wanted to talk with me. After hear­ing the above story, we looked for a resolution.

Now, I wasn’t inter­ested in the boss, nor in his belief sys­tem. I rea­soned that if he was too offen­sive, the guy could leave and eas­ily find another job. If the guy got into the “this isn’t fair, this isn’t right” stuff, noth­ing would change, he’d be mis­er­able and his depart­ment would tank. So, I asked the guy, “How many times in a row will your boss say no?” This is a polit­i­cal question.

The guy was non­plussed. He had no idea. I sug­gested he go and find out, by mak­ing a list of things he needed. Now, he’d told me that the most he’d ever asked for was two things, and was refused both, and loudly. So, I sug­gested he put two items he actu­ally didn’t want on the top of the list and start the real list at item three.

He did. His boss, pre­dictably, refused the first two requests, loudly. The guy asked for item three, the first one he really wanted. He got it. Embold­ened, he asked for one more. Got that one, too. This became his pat­tern. Ask for 2 he didn’t want, get 3 & 4. This guy actu­ally out­lasted the boss, who sold the business.

Now, was this manip­u­la­tive, or polit­i­cal? Maybe to the first, def­i­nitely to the second.

I’m sug­gest­ing that all of us go into sit­u­a­tions, rela­tion­ships, work envi­ron­ments, with an agenda. Often, that agenda doesn’t match with the agen­das of oth­ers. If we are unwise, we resort to moan­ing and com­plain­ing and sneak­ing around, try­ing to get oth­ers lined up, try­ing to make things hap­pen, frus­trat­ing our­selves try­ing to tilt against the pol­i­tics of the peo­ple who, seem­ingly, oppose us.

Almost always, there are two streams of inter­ac­tion — 1) with those we are “sim­patico” with, 2) and with those who seem to oppose us. When we act with the first group, our direc­tion is already set, we are pulling in the same direc­tion and have sim­i­lar world — views. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion is direct, and there is a decided lack of “one-upmanship.”

With those who seem to oppose us, we can eas­ily get sucked into a power play. Some­one, or both of us, may be try­ing to be proven “right.” When this hap­pens, we have to do some real, cre­ative thinking.

As you look at what is hap­pen­ing, we under­stood that the polit­i­cal task “task” is to cre­atively find ways to ful­fill our man­date, despite any knee-jerk reac­tions from those around us. In the end, we seek a way around each obsta­cle. If we focus in on “spread­ing manure,” and get caught feel­ing sorry for our­selves, we get nowhere.

Our choice, like the farmer, is to accept manure spread­ing as a part of the envi­ron­ment, and to work with it

as opposed to fight­ing it. This is not giv­ing in to it or swim­ming in it. It’s accept­ing it as one, and only one, fea­ture of the sit­u­a­tion. From this place of gen­tle under­stand­ing, ele­gant approaches emerge.

In the end, life itself is polit­i­cal, because we are con­tin­u­ally required to choose. We can choose in a knee jerk way, fight­ing, whin­ing, blam­ing, judg­ing. Or, we can choose to gen­tly accept the real­ity of each sit­u­a­tion and find a way to accom­plish our goals, while main­tain­ing our integrity.

The Zen approach is this: when I smell manure on the breeze, I remem­ber the corn on the cob that springs from it. Delicious!

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Related posts:

1. Learn Flex­i­bil­ity and Flow
2. The key to love is respect and patience
3. Love: doing all in your power to encour­age another to accept their wholeness.

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Tagged with: being personal • manure • politics • zen living

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