Seek balance, then gradually shift the balance

I appreciate this time of year for all its abundance and the invitation to rest. That invitation is always there- rest and abundance, rest and abundance. Yet we often feel like we’re in a setting of scarcity and busyness.

Perhaps this is because our energy is wasted on tasks that are either too difficult or mis-timed. Our growing energy needs to be timed right for maximum impact on our diets, and the diets of our family and community, if we give/sell food.

I picture our lives on our homestead as part of a much larger ecosystem, where we’re tied to many other people, trends, and to our respective histories.

In this ecosystem, imagine many pendulums- the normative- where things tend to hang with no energy input. An example of this could be what your family defaults to eating when no-one feels like cooking.

If you decide to put effort in, and if it’s pushing the pendulum really far in one direction, it’s going to require a LOT of effort. But there are LOTS of pendulums, and if you’re trying to push norms everywhere, you’re going to find yourself in trouble. It’ll feel like tons of effort, and you’ll eventually run out of energy, at which point the norm will reassert itself. An example of a potentially big pendulum push would be deciding to eat only organic food, or if you want to live a carbon neutral life.

Yet if you shift things very slowly and very gradually, checking for balance and adjusting, then amazing things can happen— even eating only organic food or being fully carbon neutral.

It’s always worth taking the time to consider balance, because this is how long-term transformation happens. Small shifts that get locked in until they require little to no effort, repeated a thousand times. Adding 5% home-grown foods each year, for example, can lead to bigger transformations. Massive efforts often lead to alienation from family and friends, because we become insufferable. Yet if you show that 5% to be easy, others are likely to follow along. And soon enough, you have exponential transformation in your community because of tiny shifts.

For example, if your default meal when you’re tired is pasta, you can lock in a small improvement somehow: e.g. by freezing 10 batches of healthy pasta sauce. If you are the only one in your family who eats greens, you can shift the energy in very tiny ways, by adding microgreens/baby lettuce greens in small amounts, very often. If you’re trying to add herbs to your meals, lock in a small win by finding herbs that everyone enjoys. If your child only likes carrots, give them a big tub of carrot seed to plant everywhere, a little each day, and you’ll lock in a huge body of knowledge of where and how to grow carrots in your space.

On our homestead, we’ve been locking in small wins by growing more every year. This year, we’ll hopefully become fully self-sufficient in tomatoes, almost all heirlooms that I couldn’t even germinate a few years ago. It’s felt relatively easy, but only because of the 8 seasons that came before this one. And it’ll be followed by other small improvements each year.

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