Bleary-eyed and confused, we awakened with the cock’s crow at 4:30 a.m., if memory serves. Seemed like the middle of the night to me. It’s one thing to wake early to catch a flight, but to start a day of hard physical work?
It was the one time in my life that I spent two days on a farm living with an actual farm family, doing farm things. The memory of those two days—the struggle, the exhaustion, the food, and mostly the sense of time that is part of the agrarian life—has stuck with me ever since.
We can all learn from how farmers manage their time and lives.
In this case, the work began right away as the dawn was barely appearing. I recall feeding the chickens, doing something with pigs, and baling hay, first walking through stunning amounts of cow waste to get there. Then we headed to the horses to water and brush them. Then out to the pastures to hop on big trucks to do something I cannot recall.
All of this happened before 8 a.m., by which time I was hungrier than I can ever recall being. Breakfast was gigantic, with pancakes, biscuits, bacon, ham, eggs, strangely bitter greens, coffee, and juices, and people ate like I’ve never seen. I did, too.
We stood up from the table and headed out again to pick up where we left off, on trucks, tending to the land, chasing animals here and there, fussing over crops, poking around on fences, and securing and fixing things.
Then lunch came, and it was small. In the middle of it, a varmint appeared outside. The father grabbed his gun and shot it from the living room window, making an enormous explosion to which no one paid much attention.
What struck me then was the patience, the deliberation, the absence of frustration, the sense of duty, the focus on completing a job, and the way in which the position of the sun more than the clock seemed to determine what happened when.
The fence was broken, for example. It needed to be fixed. The nail bent and broke. It needed to be pulled. A new screw was needed. We found one in the barn. The wood was warped and weathered. We cut a new one, shaped it, nailed it in place.
Watching this unfold, and a thousand other things that day that seemed to go wrong, I came to realize something. This farm, this estate, this family did not regard breakage as an abnormal occurrence. They saw it as a main driver of life, something that calls forth all our efforts on a continuing basis.
Fixing broken things, adapting when stuff does not go exactly as planned, is not just something you do; it is the essence of the job of life itself. That’s all we do: fix things. Adapt. Keep moving forward through every exigency and barrier.
Having been swept away by the writings and lifework of Eric Sloane, collector and illustrator, I’ve been thinking often about his outlook. One of his fascinating insights concerns how we use time.
He has this passage in which he celebrates the pacing of the farmer, the most experienced worker with the biggest range of skills and the longest uninterrupted traditions. The farmer approaches time as a gift and his use of it as something to treasure and treat with care.
It is never about rushing, panicking, getting angry at things, or otherwise regretting the existence of toil. It is about embracing the limits and opportunities of the world around you as it exists, and viewing one’s job as a patient, deliberate, and respectful undertaking of one’s duties. You just do what you must do, completely and wholly, one step at a time.
This is pretty much the opposite of how our age has trained our brains. We are told to regret anything we have to do, and to always seek out some shortcut or technology to do it for us. We are suckers for idiotic things such as apps to turn on lights and machines that do our thinking for us. Anything to reduce the toil and tedium, take away the tasks, and be “smart” so that we don’t have to be.
This is about an attitude toward life. We are forever kvetching and complaining about anything that takes time or requires effort. What is it that we are seeking to do instead? That’s never quite clear. Once we find ourselves doing the thing we think we would rather do, it turns out that this too becomes an arduous task and grates on us and leads us to kvetch some more.
It never ends, such that our whole lives consist of nothing but complaints. Do you think that this has a bleeding effect on our minds, bodies, and souls? It certainly does. It leads to relentless decay, a draining of all joy from the course of regular life.
Then people turn to substances and drugs to make the pain go away, except that this only makes it worse. Then we add more and more until the whole of life is utterly miserable. We come to regret and curse physicality itself, which opens other pathologies.
My theory is that this is why all of the technologies that are supposed to make us happier have done the opposite. It’s because the demand for them is rooted in the promotion of discontent. Once that attitude of universal dissatisfaction with one’s plight overwhelms any joy we might take in achievement, no product and no substance can repair the damage.
Let’s look at a practical example. In every kitchen, there will come a time when you or someone drops a glass on the floor. It breaks and shatters. What happens next is telling.
In a suburban home where all tasks are annoying and all breakage is an existential disruption, the breaking of a glass in the kitchen might lead to great drama, anger, hectoring of the causal agent, and a sense of trauma all around, followed by a huffy cleanup punctuated by curses and grave frustration.
In the farmer household, by contrast, nothing much is said. One gets the broom and dustpan and sweeps it up. There are no recriminations, curses to the heavens, anger at getting a new one, and so on. There is just an awareness that breakage is part of life.
Which is the better approach? Once the glass hits the floor and breaks, nothing can be done to reverse that history. It is done, already in the past. What matters now is how one responds to it.
Herein is the test. A person who can approach that scene with an attitude of quiet dignity, using time and tools to undertake the necessary cleaning, is likely to be a happier person overall.
This is because the breaking of the glass is a metaphor for the stream of life. The course of time itself is nothing but a relentless toggle between building and breaking, progress and regress, creativity and crashing. One goes with the other and the downsides need not be treated as horrid interruptions. Rather, they are opportunities to deploy skills in a different way, to make good use of our hands, legs, bodies, and minds.
This is all about habit formation. Back to the kitchen for guidance. Notice that many people love to cook but few like to clean. In the farmer’s kitchen, relatively sparse with few machines other than a toaster and blender, cooking and cleaning go together in one motion. One is always cleaning while cooking, to the point that when the meal is served, the kitchen is orderly already.
It’s in the urban kitchen of the perpetually disgruntled—a large kitchen packed with plugged-in gizmos and expensive machines—that you find the stacks of pans, sinks full of tools, and grime everywhere. Everything is dirty. This is because of the mental habit of always regarding the arduous task as the exception, the interruption, the regrettable thing that should be done by an app or a servant but certainly not ourselves.
In Sloane’s view, the key to a happy life is simply to emulate the farmer. Do what needs to be done, without frustration, regret, rush, complaint, or childish protest, but instead with patience and awareness. If we can somehow learn to love the gift of time and use it with diligence and discipline, we can gradually reformulate how we think about the purpose of our life.
My day on the farm introduced me to a different pace and path of life, one I thought I would leave behind when I moved far away. Now it is easier to see: The life and values of the farmer are worthy of emulation in every profession and path of life.
