This year I’ve been trying to teach myself to focus on whatever I’m doing at the moment and not being thinking ahead to the next task, or fretting about what’s to be done, or what’s left undone.
Particularly in farming I’d found myself always looking ahead to the next thing. When I was planting one field I’d be rushing to get done, thinking about the next field to plant, or thinking of all the spraying that needed to be done, or all the beans we had to plant once we got the corn in the ground. I felt frantic and rushed all the time.
If I made myself not do that, if while I planted a field of corn, I focused on planting that field of corn and didn’t worry about the next field, I was much happier, relaxed, and less prone to forget things and make mistakes.
Especially when things weren’t going well. If I told myself, “now you’re replacing a broken part on the planter” instead of thinking of all the planting I wasn’t getting done while fixing the !@@$%% John !@#$%^ Deere piece of !@#$#$#ing junk, even dealing with breakdowns wasn’t an unpleasant experience.
This fall, on the last day of soybean harvest, I forgot this lesson. And I was quickly reminded of its value.
I was unloading a semi-load of soybeans when Lana called me and said the combine had burned up one of its many v-belts. We had a spare at the shop and I was nearly done unloading the semi so I told her I’d grab the spare and bring it with me back to the field.
At this point I started thinking about the combine repair and what we needed to do to replace the belt, and would we still be able to get done with soybeans today with this down time?
When the semi ran empty I grabbed the belt and headed back to field. The belt went on with no problem and we were going again with only a minimal delay. Whew! All is well!
I swung the grain buggy around and started dumping soybeans into the semi. Our new grain buggy is a marvelous thing. It’ll fill the semi in 2 minutes. That’s pushing soybeans out at around 10 bushels per second. I opened up the unloader on the grain buggy and let ‘er rip and… soybeans gushed onto the ground from the door on the semi I’d forgotten to close because I was thinking about the job ahead of me (fixing the combine) instead of what I had been doing at the moment (unloading the semi).
I slammed the grain buggy off, but at 10 bushels a second there was a considerable pile on the ground by then. I grabbed a scoop shovel, started shoveling beans off the ground, and reflected that it’s always better to “stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.”
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