Purpose and Hydroponics

A friend recently went on and on about his hydroponics project. I could care less about hydroponics, probably because plants die in my care. But I care about my friend.

This friend wonders about what real purpose he has, so I decided to use his hydroponics project to explore the purposes behind it. I asked him “How does your hydroponics project benefit someone other than yourself?” Wouldn’t you know his family is just crazy about eating salad.

Then I ask “How does your hydroponics project connect you to people beyond your family?“ Turns out members of his extended family have hydroponics gardens too, and they all have their own ways of doing it. I can just imagine the lot of them going out for beers after a long day at a hydroponics conference, but I didn’t ask.

I don’t know how my friend would explain the satisfying purposes of the hydroponics project, but I see that it took him from being a consumer to being a consumer plus a producer plus a member of a community. Isn’t this one of the moves that successful people make over and over again after they pass through childhood?

Children have to start out with everything provided for them. As they grow, they start doing things that could also benefit others. Then they become really good at an activity and end up collaborating, cooperating, and competing among their society’s most excellent…hydroponists? Is that a word? Well you get the idea.

Striving and Failure

People hate failure, and yet striving to do something at the edge or beyond your ability will lead often to failure.

I do not mean failing to care for your own basic needs and eventually the needs of others. Striving is more than surviving.

Striving means pursuing something worthwhile, with certainty about its value but uncertainty about its achievement. You have some certainty about what needs to be done but uncertainty about whether your performance will measure up or about whether something out of your control will scuttle your project.

But you wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to pursue it, so you choose to strive.

A Hopeful, Realistic Parade Of Ideas

One way of understanding your daily experience is to recognize how thoughts and emotions pass through you all day. Sometimes they fall into patterns that you can recognize for good or for ill. Early psychologists called it stream of consciousness, and novelists like William Faulkner and James Joyce explored this phenomenon in their characters.

We don’t always choose which thoughts and emotions pass through us, but we can choose how to direct them.

How To Direct Your Own Thoughts And Emotions

Learn how to direct your thoughts and emotions by engaging daily with hopeful patterns of thought. Here are two examples

1. Monks gather to recite psalms, which lead their minds and hearts through a sometimes joyful, sometimes fearful, but always in the end hopeful and comforting series of ideas.

2. In a novel, poem, play or movie an author leads an audience through a series of ideas about characters and their actions.

Over time, exposing yourself to positive and realistic patterns of thought and emotion outweighs the negative ideas.

Choose Your Focus Over The Long Term

With a reservoir of good thoughts and emotions, you can direct the thoughts and emotions you encounter in yourself and in others. Social media actually reveals how you do this to yourself, for better or worse. Algorithms feed you more of what you’ve chosen in the past. They essentially speed up the process of revealing how you are shaping your own thoughts and emotions. The same process is also at work in things like your possessions, friendships, conversations, and physical environment, which also reflect the thoughts and emotions you choose to put into your life.

How To Start

Set aside time daily to think back on the most powerful ‘thought and emotion moments’ of your day. Most importantly, set aside time daily to expose yourself to a hopeful and realistic parade of ideas. Here is a psalm and a poem to get you started.

Psalm 70

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
    O Lord, make haste to help me!
2 Let those be put to shame and confusion
    who seek my life.
Let those be turned back and brought to dishonour
    who desire to hurt me.
3 Let those who say, ‘Aha, Aha!’
    turn back because of their shame.

4 Let all who seek you
    rejoice and be glad in you.
Let those who love your salvation
    say evermore, ‘God is great!’
5 But I am poor and needy;
    hasten to me, O God!
You are my help and my deliverer;
    O Lord, do not delay!

Gratitude Regardless of How You Feel

Here are three spiritual moves that anyone, Christian or not, can take. I’ll use the passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians 5:16-24 to make this point because I am a Christian. I’ll trust that people of other worldviews can translate Paul’s insight into their own belief system. 

#1 Gratitude in all circumstances

These verses come from the end of the letter, where St. Paul urged his fellow Christians, “In all circumstances give thanks.” But all too often, we are joyful in good circumstances but give no thanks while we are sad in difficult circumstances and only then seek help. The first spiritual move, therefore, is to push beyond the alternating emotions of joy and sadness or anger (or both!) and add gratitude in all circumstances. 

#2 Test everything and retain what is good

The second move is, as St Paul says, to “test everything and retain what is good.” That requires wise judgment, but the alternating experiences of joy and sadness can sway our judgment. We judge good whatever prolongs joy and what eliminates sadness. But what is truly good does not always fit our emotional frame of the moment. In order to “test everything and retain what is good,” we sometimes need patience to tolerate sadness and anger and need thoughtfulness about the source of joy.  

#3 Give and receive love

Gratitude helps us see the cause of joy and tolerate sadness and anger to judge accurately the cause of pain. These two spiritual moves support the third: to give and receive love. St. Paul promises the Thessalonians that the “God of peace” will make them “perfect in holiness and … spirit, soul, and body … preserved blameless.” Putting it all together, a Christian’s offer of gratitude helps them to see God’s offer of friendship.

Putting it into practice

Making these spiritual moves might sound complicated, but there is a “hack.” Pick a moment every day, set an alarm and express gratitude at that moment regardless of how you feel. You will probably become more aware of your cycles of joy and sadness or anger. Becoming more aware of these emotions will make you a better judge of whatever is good in the persons and situations you encounter. Becoming a better judge of what is truly good makes you fit in “spirit, soul, and body” to give and receive love, or to put it in more familiar terms, to be a better friend.