Alright, so folks ask me about my “process” sometimes, how I get from A to B. Lemme tell ya, it ain’t always pretty. You start with an idea, think it’s straightforward. But then things just… balloon. Get all sorts of complicated shapes you never saw coming. It’s like one of those things that just grows and grows, and suddenly it’s this massive undertaking, totally ‘pregnant’ with features and problems you didn’t sign up for.
I remember this one time, I was working on what I thought was a small community garden project. Just a few raised beds, you know? Simple. That was the plan. My “practice” was all about keeping it lean, manageable. Hah! Fat chance.
The “Simple” Garden That Ate The Neighborhood
First, more people wanted in. Okay, cool, community spirit, right? So we needed more beds. Then someone said, “We need a fancy irrigation system!” Another wanted a giant scarecrow, like, movie-prop big. Before I knew it, this little patch of green was this enormous thing. We’re talking paperwork for land use, arguments about compost sourcing – the works. The budget got ‘pregnant’ too, swollen up like nobody’s business.
My records from that time? Mostly just me pulling my hair out. It was a classic case of scope creep, but on steroids. We had ‘big’ ideas, alright. So big they nearly crushed the whole thing. We’d hold meetings, and instead of talking about tomatoes, we’d be bogged down in sub-committee reports about stuff I didn’t even know we had sub-committees for!
- Meetings about meetings.
- Debates over the color of the damn shed.
- Someone even suggested a petting zoo. A PETTING ZOO.
It became this… this caricature of a project. You’d look at it and think, “How did we even get here?” It was so far from the original idea. All those extra bits, those ‘big’ additions, they weren’t necessarily bad on their own, but together? Overwhelming. It was like trying to carry a watermelon when you only expected to pick up a grape.
Eventually, we had to do a major prune-back. Get realistic. It was tough, felt like admitting defeat. But that was the real “practice” – learning when something’s gotten too ‘big’ for its own good, too ‘pregnant’ with things that distract from the core. We had to strip it back to basics to save it. Took a while, a lot of honest talks. Not as flashy in the end, but it worked. It actually produced vegetables, imagine that!
So yeah, that’s a page from my record book. Things can get out of hand real fast if you don’t watch ’em. What starts simple can end up… well, you know. A whole different beast. Keep it real, folks. Keep it focused.
