Through my rocky menopausal years, my compassionate doctor has advised me that I suffer from hyper-vigilance. Now there’s a good word. My definition would be: “exhausted but restless obsessive-compulsive perfectionist workaholic”. It’s true. I want everything to be clean, neat, orderly, and caught up. And I stress and overwork myself to make that so.
I’ve often wondered where I got this lovely quality from. Could it be my parents? No, they lived life at a much slower pace than I, and they never pushed me. From my peers? Negatory. I’ve always been the one that marched to the beat of a different drummer. It’s a quandary.
My recent trip to Kauai offered insight into a certain mentality I may have bought into as a child. We were staying at a large resort. The gardens were beautiful and immaculate. But, it was obvious that the landscaping had been completely imported; all the native plant life that was originally there had been scraped up and discarded, replaced by a much cleaner, neater landscape design. On my way to a morning walk on the beach, the swans that lived in the man-made pond were being captured and kenneled in order to protect them from the herbicidal spraying that was going to take place to kill the unwelcome weeds.
After I walked along the beach for a while, I encountered a little trail that led up into the woods. Before long, I realized I had found the dump. Mounds of cuttings and palm fronds which were a product of keeping those gardens so antiseptically “clean” had been deposited here. The landscape in this area was untouched by human hands and quite messy. Dead palm fronds lay where they fell. Dead limbs of trees jutted up from the forest canopy, and weeds abounded. But this was where I chose to sit and write. The birds were more plentiful here. Bullfrogs chanted from the green pond. Chickens and their chicks foraged amongst the compost. It struck me that my hyper-vigilance could be a product of growing up in a society where “messy” and “dirty” were definitely not considered to be “civilized”.
Life is messy. So is Mother Nature if you let her be. And yet, there is a vital balance amongst this madness. All the dead and rotting debris provides habitat and food for the wildlife. Bumble bees abound here, collecting nectar from the native flowering weeds and shrubs. It has been proven that the sharp decline in the bees is a direct result of the sharp decline in untouched natural vegetation.
I’ll never forget the time I was sunbathing by the Atlantic Ocean in Florida, and I overheard an elderly lady complain to her friend, “The beach is so sandy!” It seems we’re missing the point. Our job here on this planet isn’t to eradicate and eliminate anything that doesn’t fit into our short-sighted idea of “civilization”, but to learn how to co-exist with everyone and everything symbiotically.
Well, my backside is hurting from sitting on the trunk of this palm tree. I’m sure those lounge chairs around the pool would have been more comfortable. But, I thank the palm tree for sharing his spine with me, and I send blessings to all the birds and bees that have passed by. I don’t feel so hyper now. I’m the one who has been blessed, and I’ll remember this messy paradise the next time I start to obsess about the “disorder” in my own life. The only disorder that exists in my life is in my mind. Everything else is perfect.
