The beans are starting to train up the twine. The tomatoes are confused, with the smallest bearing three tiny tomatoes and the bigger plants starting to flower. The peppers have gone on strike with this mild spring. Even the zucchini is content to leaf out – not a single flower even though the garden plot catty-corner from mine has majestic zucchini resplendent with glorious yellow blossoms.

But my weeds! It’s early, sure, but I’ve got a bumper crop going of frustratingly creeping vines, broad-leafed deep-rooted parasites, and if you pull one up three grow back in its place…

Weeding is, without question, the worst part of gardening.

A couple of weeks ago my plot was utterly overrun with unwanted foliage. I had to split the work up over a couple of afternoons to give my back and knees a chance. And you know what I had at the end of each day to show for my labor? Dirt.

Of course, when I came back to water a couple days later it really did seem like all the plants (the legitimate ones I planted) seemed to stand a little taller, glow a little more vibrantly green.

Not gonna lie: I cursed them all a little bit.

I mean, I know, you’ve got to do the things you don’t want to do but are “good for you.” But if you’re looking for the sermon detailing how we’re all better off for the hard work of “weeding” in our own life, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Sure, the plants were standing tall, but my back was still sore. And I joked that I’d finish weeding a row only to turn around to find the weeds had all grown back.  It’s funny… because you know it’s true.

Truth is, I was planning on weeding on Sunday – marathon session under the midday sun and just get the whole plot done. That sounded great in my head! Of course it didn’t come to pass. You know what I did instead? Not a damn thing. Sunday could be seen – through a certain lens – as one colossal waste of time. Nothing whatsoever was accomplished.

But it was a blissfully necessary lethargy. And, I recognized, the eye of the storm.

The last few weekends have been jam packed with obligations. Last week in particular I fixed a can organizer project, built that drawer I wrote about, tended to the garden, even picked up the kitchen. And things are getting crazier from here on out, too, with trying to cram bartending gigs while preparing for an upcoming epic motorcycle trip that’s only about three weeks away.

I needed Sunday to do nothing just so I could remember what doing nothing felt like.

The weekend wasn’t a total waste, though. Saturday morning I got in a great hike from Shell beach up to Red Hill and then put the front wheel back on the motorcycle and gave it a quick test ride. Having officially accomplished a couple things, however, I settled in to a nice session of doing nothing.

I frequently find myself caught between two worlds. I know (and envy) people who just can’t sit still. They have to be fixing something, building something, creating something. Constantly in motion. These are the people who were happily weeding on Sunday after they cleaned their house top to bottom and afterwards prepared all the meals for the week.

I’m tired just thinking about these people.

I do have some of those tendencies.

However, I’m also a card carrying member of Procrastinators United (our motto: we’ll get you a motto tomorrow). Case in point: weeding. The weeds didn’t grow that much between Sunday and today.

An example of this dual states of mind is that Akilah gives me crap because I notoriously never finish a TV series. Part of it is I just don’t want things to end (I still haven’t finished the last half of the final season of The Good Place because I don’t want it to be over) so I’m pushing off watching the ending. But another part of not finishing TV series is that something’s got to be really good for me to sit through it.

I filled the 5-gallon bucket with weeds tonight before the failing light forced me to postpone finishing weeding for another evening. The tomatoes are weed-free, as are the beans and zucchini. I’ll probably be back at it on Wednesday, clearing the weeds from the finicky peppers and trying to figure out where the beets stop and the weeds begin. So far, my back doesn’t seem the worse for wear. Part of that is genuinely the rest I gave it yesterday – I was a little over exuberant on the downhill portions of Saturday’s hike.

Sunday was a wonderful day of doing nothing… except, of course, for letting my body rest so I can get going on everything that’s to come. Time’s going to go into fast-forward in just a second here. I’m glad I had a day to let everything slow down and quiet my mind and body.

The weeds, obligingly, waited for me.