When everything feels urgent + important
My wife, Lyndsey, and I bought a 40 acre, off grid, solar-powered farm last summer. And since then I’ve been on what feels like a PhD journey of energy management.
I mean this literally on every level. It’s as much about how I manage my physical energy as well as how I pay attention to the solar-powered battery bank on a cloudy day.
One of the things that drew us to this place was how connected we would have to be to each energy input.
Our only source of heat in the main house is a wood burning stove. Each log has been cured, cut & stacked based on its density. Madrone & oak burn long and fir gets us roaring quickly.
We operate completely off the electrical grid, so every appliance we run needs to NOT fry our solar and battery system. I was pretty freaked out about this in the beginning.
We pump water from an agricultural pond to holding tanks to water our orchard, animals and garden. Checking the water level in the tanks regularly ensures we can plan to run our solar pump on the sunniest of days (which we have plenty of) so we don’t run out.
We don’t have trash or recycling service out here, so it’s a “carry in and carry out” situation. It really makes you think twice about if we truly need that thing before purchasing.
We’re 20 minutes up a dirt, mountain road so even a trip to the grocery store is by design.
This land requires us to be conscious. We have to operate everything with care and intention.
Is it convenient? No fucking way.
And that’s the whole point. It’s the right challenge for us right now.
We chose this lifestyle because it requires our attention. Our presence. Our involvement.
Lessons on attention: (that might help you too)
When everything feels urgent & important, simplify. In classic ADHD style, I moved into this adventure trying to do everything all at once. I’m still (6 months into the move) refinishing the chairs I brought here that I LOVE and rescued from Facebook Marketplace two years ago, btw. It’s okay to pause & simplify your task list. It might require eliminating things from it. You are not your To-Do list. You are something much more magical and beautiful.
Agility is a flex. When the sheep eat all the grass in one paddock, they will break out and eat your cabbage until you move them to the next grassy area. And it will happen before you expect it to… on a Sunday. Resisting change just slows you down.
Using someone else’s design might just be the recipe for failure. Stop trying to mold into YEARS worth of garden trellising from the previous land stewards. Just remove it all and start over. You gotta work with what YOU got. A fresh perspective & creating space can make all the difference.
My mantra lately? “This is harder than I thought, and that’s okay.” I borrowed this from my teacher, Dr. Martha Beck.
You don’t have to move to the woods to know what I’m talking about. Giving your attention and presence to the things that REALLY matter to you isn’t easy. And it’s often not convenient. And that’s okay!
I know what it feels like to be pulled in a million directions. To feel like everything is urgent and important.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed and then do nothing. Or default to doom scrolling or watching Jersey Shore or self medicating or whatever.
Attention is a skill that we can get better and better at.
But it does require change. It does require new systems and tools. It will sometimes require abandoning external designs and expectations. AND THIS is the next right challenge. This is the work I’m calling you into when you’re ready.
