People tell me how their lives are too busy to act on their environmental values.
“I wish I could pollute less,” they say, “but I don’t have time.”
I happened on a passage in a book on Thomas Jefferson, who actively farmed while President of the United States. You may say, “But the nation was smaller then.”
First, you don’t have to farm to live by your values. You have plenty of other options.
Second, he also
- Wrote most of the Declaration of Independence
- Was Minister to France
- Secretary of State
- Helped create the Democratic-Republican party
- Invented and designed many things, such as Monticello
- Wrote a book considered the most important American book before 1800
- Founded the University of Virginia
He did more, but those achievements seemed a good start. Fresh vegetables didn’t seem to hold him back.
If you haven’t achieved things like those, is it possible that you’re capable of more and that excuses, not your values, are keeping you from your potential?
What keeps you from your values?
What are you doing that’s preventing you from achieving on his scale, because growing vegetables didn’t seem to stop him.
Here’s Monticello’s vegetable garden from inside the home he designed:
