If you want to know someone’s relationship to control, look at their garden. Do you see perfect rows, everything staked, every weed pulled, all on a thoughtfully laid out bed?

Or did life find a way?

Nature triumphed so I had a lush garden conquered by volunteer plants, the children of previous gardens. I watched them, recognized them as being things I like to eat, and let many of them live. I weeded when I had a chance. The garden mostly grew.

You’d never notice from the fact I ate red cherry tomatoes with every meal for a month that I had bought merely one cherry tomato plant (orange sungold). That salsa verde was a consistent staple of my meals wasn’t foreseen by a few tomatillos that I planted – last year’s variety took over the garden. I planted some heirloom tomatoes, many peppers, a bunch of greens, herbs, and marigolds. The Malabar spinach planted itself. Tulsi bolted and then there was more everywhere. These were some of last year’s plants. Some weeds are edible, so I let them grow a bit before sautéing them into my eggs.

There’s best laid plans and then. Every green that wasn’t a choy ended up on the dinner plate of the woodchuck. I did not not invite her- she just showed up. The feral cats turned a blind eye. The marigolds were ineffective deterrents – my husband told me I just made a really beautiful tablescape for her. When the greens got choked out by the tomatillos, and the vines too big to get through – then they survived, guarded, but with insufficient sun to get to a size worth eating from. The woodchuck doesn’t like Malabar spinach either. Probably because of its mucilaginous tendencies. I don’t really like the slime either, to be honest.

At the end of the main season, I’d look across at the balance of plants and sometimes wish I had culled differently, worried that the plants I let live minimized the output of the plants I had put their intentionally. I imagine a slight change here, and a completely different future. Knowing what the result was, I want to go back and tweak. I don’t get to know if any of those changes would have made a difference. Maybe the woodchuck would have eaten more, maybe squirrels decimated more tomatoes if I had planted them, or maybe some unforeseen blight culling my success.

I’m at that phase of life – you know, midlife – where I understand my present circumstances as a cumulative effect of all the choices younger me made. I was guessing and reacting at the time; older me got to see what happened next. And next. And next. And I either like it or I don’t. I’m in the phase of life where one takes inventory and tries to discern what to do with what time’s left. Does something need to change? Am I content with how I’ve been spending my one wild and precious life?

I can see, in hindsight, how various decisions directly impacted certain present circumstances. I decided to pursue social sciences in college instead of STEM. I decided to marry Will. We moved to Seattle. We had a child. We came back. We had another child. I decided to pursue work trying to make the world better. We bought this house. I got another job. And in between, all of the other moments of “we joined a church”, “we made a friend,” “made another friend,” “oh, that friend too,” “we dissolved that relationship,” and every moment that reads like a decision road-map to exactly where I am standing now. I’m not terribly regretful. But there’s some marked imperfectness and I see exactly what I did that got me here now. So now what?

The thing is, I only had control over what I did. I had influence, but the outcomes are always more than just what I do.

There is an illusion that different choices made would have led to a more desirable outcome. I beat myself up with this sometimes. What If we’d bought a different house runs through my head a lot, as the repairs of this one are consuming our energy. I imagine an illusion of a calmer life and better finish work. The reason it’s an illusion is that you don’t actually know how it would have played out. What-if brings you to the land of imagination. The reality? Who knows. Maybe we’d gotten a nicer house but unbeknownst to us, it was on a street struggling with violence. Maybe it would have burned down. Or maybe it would have been actually nicer. You won’t know what could have happened; you’ll only know what did. It’s so easy to think you know what would have happened if you had done the Other Thing. But you don’t. You can’t. That world never was.

Just because a plant a seed doesn’t mean it’ll grow. I can better the odds, but I can’t guarantee the outcome. My desire for control and my attempts to garner control do not mean I’ll get to have full control. That is also true when I imagine different outcomes. I don’t know.

Gardens are a reminder on how your efforts and energy are just a part of what happens. You cannot control the rest of the world, just influence it.