The sun was out today, so it gave me an opportunity to do the garden, which was starting to look like the owners had vacated the premises several months ago.

Within the garden there is a small section that is boarded off and at one time served as a little vegetable patch that, for a few seasons, gave us some potatoes, carrots, beetroot and a variety of herbs.

Like so many things in life, this became less and less of an attractive proposition as each year’s crop seemed to amount to not much more than one dinners quotas of veg, and so the enthusiasm to do it each year waned ever so slightly.

This has resulted in a baron piece of real estate bordering our lawn.

I say baron, but it is far from baron.

It is instead, a fertile land of breading weeds, who, no sooner have they been plucked from the good earth, do they seem to resurrect themselves as soon as I turn my back. I should call it the ‘Lazarus weed garden’.

Each time I do the garden I weed this patch in order to make the garden look tidy. However today I noticed I asked myself a question that often seems to comes to mind, ‘what’s the point?’

What’s the point of weeding this patch that nothing actually happens in, only to have the weeds grow back tomorrow?

Whilst I pondered this in mid pluck of said ‘Vegetable patch squatter’, I recognised something that interested me.

I realised that it wasn’t the fact that the weeds won’t stop growing in the patch, or that I had to remove them that was bothering me. What was bothering me was that I was putting effort into clearing something that had no purpose other than to be a weed breading farm.

It may have potential to be something great, as it once was, or was believed to have been, when it stood to serve the house hold as a self-sufficient vegetable provider.

However, right now it felt pointless. It was not contributing to something bigger that was worth ‘toiling, stripped to the waist, sweating in the midday sun for’.

The weeds, like problems and challenges will always come up no matter how many of them we face up to or eradicate from our life.

The proverb ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’ can often feel true as we plug one hole only to find a leak sprung somewhere else in our lives.

However what I discovered today was, that despite the weeds, (which will still be popping up long after I’m not around to pluck them,) the thing that will make them worth plucking, is to create a bigger picture for this piece of ground. A purpose if you will.

Without a purpose or a function, regardless of the potential of the land, we lose interest and become indifferent about the outcome. Lethargy creeps in and we ask ourselves what’s the point?

We have to create the point. We have to harvest a passion or a purpose that’s makes the ‘weeds’ in life just part of the process of cultivating a purpose worth clearing the ground for.

In the case of the redundant veggie patch, I need to create a purpose for that patch of ground that makes simply makes removing the weeds a process necessary to allow for something better to emerge or to be built upon.