A For the last several years, I have been push mowing my yard every Saturday. It takes about two hours, starting in April and not ending until October—and sometimes even November.
I could use a riding lawn mower because my yard is wide open, but I tried that a few years ago and left big tire marks all over the yard. It looked awful. I decided right then that a push mower was the only way to make it look nice.
I live in the country, and for the last five years, I have been working on making my country yard look all pretty, like a yard you might find in town. I started having a company come out and do all the fertilizing, weed killing, pre-emergent treatments, and all the things they do that I don’t even understand.
The weeds started to go away. The bare spots started to fill in. The grass became thicker. The yard began to look like green carpet.
I continued to push mow the yard because I wanted to be gentle on the grass, and I liked the way the mower lines looked.
Over the last few years, I really wanted to save time and just use my riding mower, but I kept thinking, “No, the last time I did that, the yard looked awful.”
A couple of weeks ago, I had finally had enough of spending two hours in the blazing sun. I decided, “It’s just grass, and grass is like hair. It will grow back.”
So I pulled out the riding lawn mower, adjusted the deck height, and began to mow, still unsure how the finished yard would look.
When I got done, there were no tire marks. The grass was even, and it looked amazing.
I thought, “Well, let’s just see how it looks tomorrow.”
The next day, it still looked amazing.
Every week since then, I have saved myself an hour every Saturday by using the riding lawn mower, and my yard looks better than it ever has.
I had been push mowing all these years because I was holding on to an old preconceived idea about how bad my yard looked when I used a riding lawn mower.
I held on to that idea even though I had been having the yard professionally treated. I had been letting it grow higher. I had been getting rid of weeds and bare spots. I had been regularly watering it.
I had changed everything I had been doing to the yard, but I still believed the outcome would be the same.
How often are we guilty of the same thing in life?
We change things about ourselves—from our thoughts to our actions—but still believe we are the old version of ourselves, even when that version is no longer true.
My challenge to each of us this week is to reflect and question our thoughts, emotions, and actions to make sure they still line up with our values. And if they do, then we need to ask ourselves, “How can I improve them so they become even more rooted in those values?”
The lesson: Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it still works today.
Sometimes we have to let go of an old idea in order to gain a new perspective on the well-manicured lawn we call our mind.