How agile & resilient are we?
So I’ve just started doing some serious gardening (“serious” because I’ve done some experimental gardening before, i.e. put a shallot into the ground, harvest spring onion leaves, you know, that sort of kiddy-gardening that most horticulturists start from)
But end of last year, I had more time on my hands. I thought, ‘Enough of those expensive store-bought herbs. I’m gonna grow me some of my own!’ There’s that photo of me with my newly bought rosemary and sweet basil. I’m looking gleeful here because I thought I’ve done enough research to make sure that these two survive. I’ve watched the necessary YouTube videos, read the popular gardening websites, and bought the necessary soil and fertiliser to make it work.
The sweet basil died on me a month later. Eaten up by snails. The rosemary was going strong still! I mustered up enough courage, bought another pot of sweet basil, put it on higher ground, keeping it out of the snails’ reach. But what do you know? A spate of rain brought those critters out. This basil lasted only 3 days. I threw in the towel. That’s it. Who needs sweet basil anyway? NOBODY.
Then I attended a lesson on agile learning at work, watched Tong Yee’s Bicentennial lecture series, recalled Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability and read the company’s e-book on how to overcome challenges in digital adoption, and somehow they all worked together to remind me that life these days will require me to constantly pick up new skills and to be courageous enough to do so. The world is changing faster than we could imagine. I think Covid-19 perfectly demonstrates the fragility and fluidity of it all.
These days, lifelong learning isn’t cliché. It is reality. And my foray into gardening gave me a good assessment of how agile a learner I am. Turns out, I’m neither agile nor resilient as a learner. I prefer the comfort and safety of the familiar, and when old methods don’t work on the new content, I whine and gripe about how life’s getting tougher these days. Boohoo.
However, something in the e-book caught my eye. Growth mindset can actually happen with the right motivation. For those of us who have difficulty getting on with a new programme, maybe all that we need is a reason for the change. And a compelling enough reason is as good a motivator as any other.
I wanted to learn how to grow these herbs, not just because I’m a cheapskate who balks at $7 a box for a few sprigs of rosemary, but because I wanted to savour the same sense of satisfaction that I had when I taught at MOE and in Enneagram workshops, helping learners of all ages in one way or another. And I wanted to extend that sense of achievement to these plants because I really enjoy having greenery in my backyard and I refuse to go down in history as the urban gardener who was defeated by a snail or two! (Actually there were scores of them. Not that anyone cares…) So there! I think that’s a good enough reason to try to grow some sweet basil again.
So to end off, here’s a recent photo of my garden. And yes, there are new sweet basil saplings once again. Let’s hope that they would thrive this time round! And guess what, recent research revealed to me that copper foil tapes work as slug-deterrents! Ha! Who knew?
One never stops learning.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
