I never wanted to be the guy standing out in his yard with a garden hose watering his lawn.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you. I’ve just never been the kind of dude to get all excited about TURF BUILDER and BROADLEAF KILLING ACTION.
But I did sometimes sit around dreaming about what it’d be like to own a home (you know, having a house on a nice plot of land and a nearby stream and a dog and a little writing cottage where I could sneak out back and write while wearing an over-sized woolen cardigan and sipping a steaming cup of tea while it snowed).
Somehow in becoming a home owner, I became the guy who stands in his yard with a garden hose watering the lawn.
Dreams are funny like that. Even when you achieve them, they often come with a bunch of other stuff that’s just as annoying or tedious as anything you had to deal with before you accomplished them.
Many authors discover that once they’ve Become Published, they have to spend an awful lot of time doing things that aren’t Writing, like interviews and book signings and guest blog posts and generally all the other self-promoting type activities that most of them never wanted to do in the first place.
A lot of entrepreneurs leave their humdrum 9-to-5 40-hour-a-week corporate job to go do The Thing They Love, and discover that now they’re working 8AM-to-midnight 100-hour-a-week jobs (because they only work 4 hours on Sundays) that include a whole bunch of stuff like sending out invoices and filing taxes and wondering why they’re making less now than they did working for The Man.
And don’t even get me started about what designing video games is REALLY like. (Hint: It, surprisingly, from what I can tell so far, does NOT involve dropping off that 149 page notebook you filled up with GOOD IDEAS when you were in high school and returning 6 months later to find it implemented Just As You Envisioned and awesome.)
SPOILER ALERT: The tedious will always be with you, wherever you go. It’s part of the hidden cost of The Dream. But it’s a whole lot easier to handle when you’re dealing with the tedious bits of The Dream, instead of the tedious bits of the other thing you’re doing instead of The Dream.
(And by a whole lot, I might actually mean only marginally so.)
Because at least then there is Purpose.
At least, that’s what I try to tell myself when I’m standing in the front lawn in my bathrobe, dark socks, and flip flops, garden hose in hand, showering my precious baby grass seedlings and desperately hoping that maybe this will be the year they turn the tide against all the brown and yellowy gross creeping plant things that require no tending whatsoever to completely dominate a lawn and yet are, for some reason, not considered suitable ground cover by anyone else in the neighborhood not that I’m bitter.