By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
I was in the vegetable garden the other evening when I was surprised by a sight I had never seen before: a tree frog, happily sitting atop a cabbage.
Now, I’ve seen frogs before, and I’ve seen cabbages before, but a frog setting up house in a vegetable garden? Frogs are finicky about the places they frequent. They are literally “thin skinned.” This being the case, it’s rare to see them in places where they could be made sick by the environment. When I realized that my little garden had become a place where a frog felt good about hanging out, I was proud. But why? The purpose of the garden is to grow food for me and the family, not to create a frog habitat. So, what am I proud of exactly? What did I succeed in accomplishing?
Maybe I’m confused because success, in our cultural context, is not supposed to be a surprise. Failure often surprises, but success not so much. Success is expected to the extent that we will twist and manipulate outcomes so that we can declare success even when abject failure hangs around our necks like a noose.
We are a success-culture. Everything is measured, graded, compared, evaluated, rated, scored and judged. We set goals, meet expectations, deliver on promises, achieve objectives, set our intents and accomplish missions. As far as it goes … this is good. But I’m learning (from tree frogs and cabbages among other things) that often, where we focus our success-energy is not the place that needs our attention. Sometimes, when we succeed in one endeavor, we’re failing in others.
We succeeded in making food cheap for many people, but we made them obese. We succeeded in lifting the value of personal freedom, but we have no shame. We made education accessible, but we fill students’ heads with trash. We create more housing inventory, but we destroy salmon habitat. We recognize the dignity of children, but we abandon them to a corrupt media culture. We have fought for human rights, but we squander them on acrylic nails, monster trucks, and TikTok. We have built a growth economy, but we exploit millions of humans to maintain it.
Yet, the opposite is true too. Success can be a surprise.
Without consciously doing so, I succeeded in managing my tiny little sliver of the planet in such a way that life is actually seeking it out.
I set out to grow a cabbage, but I got something more. Surprise! Focusing on a cabbage alone gets you vast swaths of dead soil requiring huge machines, tons of poison, and an unsustainable infrastructure. But recognizing that the cabbage is part of a larger system in which I merely participate, expands “success” to include not just frogs, but dozens of bird species, voles, deer, rabbits, moles, mice, rats, weasels, bees, damselflies, ladybugs, dandelions, borage and countless other forms of life, as well as my neighbors, my ancestors and even my soul.
As we approach this general election, perhaps each of us should carefully consider what success looks like. The success of your candidate or your party may not amount to much more than a cabbage … and at what cost?
Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.
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