The gardener

"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound." James Allen wrote that in 1903, in an essay you can read in forty minutes called As a Man Thinketh. Read the sentence twice. It's the hardest and kindest line in this chamber.

Allen was an English clerk who at thirty-eight quit his job, moved his family to a small town on the Devon coast, and spent the last nine years of his life writing short books about the mind. Everyone else you've met this month read him. Mandino, Hill, Peale, Nightingale all echo him, often without saying so. I put him late in the chamber on purpose, so that when you read him you recognize where everyone else got it.

His picture is a garden. The mind is a plot of ground. It will grow something whether you tend it or not, and if you plant nothing useful, weeds come in on the wind. Thought is the seed. Action is the flower. Joy and suffering are the fruit. So you change a life the way a gardener changes a field: pull what you didn't plant, plant what you want, and keep at it through a whole season that shows nothing.

Allen is harder than the people who borrowed him. He doesn't promise wealth. He says the circumstances you're in are the ones your habitual thinking has fitted you for, which is uncomfortable and, on honest inspection, usually true in some direction. But I read him as hopeful, and here's why. If the garden got this way by what was planted, it can get another way by what is planted next. Nobody is stuck with the field they were handed. They are only stuck with the one they keep.

Seventeen days of walking and writing is seventeen days of weeding. You have more say over what grows in there than anyone has ever told you.