4th February 2012
It is 4.30 am, my alarm goes, and I fumble to silence it so I can continue to stew in the toxic but somehow addictive juice of my own negative thoughts and anxieties. Every part of my body, is in revolt against the prospect of getting up. My mind is reinforcing the resistance, reminding me that I have had a hard week with much travel and that my poor, frail body deserves a rest.
But my son Sam is coming to make cheese at 7am and I have to be finished by then, so I have no choice. Pulling on my clothes, I struggle, full of self-pity, across the freezing yard into the new milking parlour. It is minus 5°C and despite our attempts to insulate it, there are many frozen pipes and valves. At sixty one, why on earth do I continue punish myself in this way? I get the cows out, rake fresh straw from our 2011 oat crop over the cubicle beds and scrape the cow manure out with our 1967 Massey Ferguson 135 tractor, after which I manage to get the first four clusters working. It is still really cold, I feel turgid and ill, and I still can't imagine why I am such a masochist.
Half an hour later, my blood is starting to flow, and out of nowhere, a positive thought arises. I imagine how we could grow better grass this year, and hang all the gates before the cows go out. By the time I have milked another 30 cows my mood has completely transformed. I resolve to ask my boys if they will help out this evening, they will be thrilled, and I hold optimistically to the idea that next week there could be a global transformation to more sustainable food systems. Suddenly, I am full of the joy which can only come from physical work on the land.
What is this strange transformation which has taken place in me, so quickly that I could hardly identify the second when it occurred? I can see that there is much here for me to observe, because this is, in a microcosm, the story of my life. I am constantly in the grip of changing states of positive and negative energy, and paradoxically it is only through conquering the intense physical resistance of getting up when my body absolutely refuses, that I set into motion this sequence of events which unusually for me, I've actually managed to observe, at least for a moment.
What is in question is my attitude towards the effort. Why do I spend so much of my life either avoiding this effort against what seems to be some kind of lawful resistance, when I have been given this incredible insight? It is a mystery, but I know full well in writing this that the effort required next time the alarm goes at four thirty will seem just as insurmountable.
