One of the things that makes me look forward to Spring is the accelerated rate at which my lawn will grow, meaning that there’ll be plenty of opportunities to mow the lawn. I didn’t always enjoy mowing the lawn, in fact for the first five or six years that we owned our home I detested mowing the lawn and saw it as a pointless chore. After all the grass would only grow back. It took a strange confluence of events to change my attitude, and with it discover the wonder of those parts of my life that I’d previously dismissed as a waste of time.

What kicked things off for me was my Dad’s 60th birthday, a surprise party that we travelled 900km to attend. Dad’s 60th birthday was, unsurprisingly, a time of reflection for all of us and it got me thinking a lot about how I’d felt Dad’s influence when I was younger. It also got me thinking about what sort of father my son would think I was. The age gap between my father and me is almost identical to the age gap between my son and me, and this little detail struck me incredibly hard.

As a kid I always felt that Dad was in charge of any situation, no matter how unexpected it was, that Dad could always be relied upon to have a plan or find a solution to whatever problems were thrown our way. I compared that to my own feelings of aimlessness and wondered what it would take for me to get my shit together and be able to be the steady hand on the tiller that Dad had always been.

While all of this was swirling around my head we watched Clint Eastwood’s movie Gran Turino for the first time and something hit me. Whatever else was going on in this story, at its centre was a man trying to hold on to his place in the world in the face of changes that he had no control over. One of the ways that he did that was the way he looked after his home, bringing a new ferocity to telling people to stay off his lawn.

I thought about my childhood home, the lawns always neat, edges clipped, trees pruned, paths swept and felt a pang of nostalgia. I thought about the house that my son was growing up in, and what things he would take on board from the place that he lived in.

Before we were due to come home we received word that my Godfather, Dad’s uncle, had died and so we made plans to extend our trip so that we could travel back to my home town and attend the funeral. In the decade since I’d finished university I’d only travelled back to my home town a handful of times. It was a place that I felt little sentiment for as I’d never felt that I fit in as a kid. Coming back this time, however, felt different and I saw the place that had shaped me through new eyes.

When we finally arrived home I saw my own house in a different way too. While I worried about my future and about being aimless, this little house in the suburbs was somewhere that I could carve out a place in the world for myself and feel anchored. The next day was spent servicing my much neglected mower, cleaning filters, changing oil, spark plug and blades and then putting it to use. I wanted to be like Clint, and Dad, and create a place that bought me stability no matter what else was going on around me, but on the way to achieving this goal I ended up finding something even more wonderful, the amazing peace that can come from these mundane tasks.

I have a pattern that I use every time that I mow the lawn, it’s the way that I did it the first time after we came home and I’ve done it the same way ever since. Once around the edge then back and forward in the front yard and on the nature strip, twice around the edge out back where there are more obstacles when you have to turn around. There’s something wonderful about the repetition and, courtesy of a set of earplugs, the solitude of these simple tasks. Sweeping the driveway might not initially appear to have much in common with tending a Zen Garden, but there’s no reason that it can’t be a similarly calming experience allowing you to concentrate on things beyond what you’re doing in the moment.

I began looking for other things that allowed me a moment of reflection in my unremarkable suburban existence and found no shortage of them. While ironing two shirts is an annoyance, a whole basket can be blissful. Hanging out the washing so that everything fits properly on the line can be extremely satisfying, washing the windows, oiling the deck, weeding a garden bed all bring with them the chance to move your attention beyond the continuous interruptions that we seem to invite into our lives without realising what we’re doing.

What finally became clear to me was that it wasn’t the chore that was important, but taking back the time and attention that I’d been frittering away. I don’t think that we value our attention as much as we should, we allow every new app on our phone to interrupt us, we are bombarded by a never ending stream of email, tweets, blog comments, and phone calls that disrupt our ability to focus on anything. How have we allowed ourselves to become slaves to interruptions?

We often tell ourselves that we simply cannot avoid these things in our life stealing away our ability to focus, but the reality is that we choose not to. We are gripped by a kind of anxiety about what will happen if we don’t know what’s happening at every single moment of the day so we don’t quit our email, close down Twitter, turn off our phone or at the very least stop letting stupid apps buzz away to tell us that we need to harvest the zombies that we planted earlier. And yet when you are alone with the mower all of these things fall away, you are alone with your thoughts and the world goes on regardless of your inability to instantly acknowledge people who want your attention.

Meditation with the mower has completely changed the way that I look at the tasks that make up my life and influenced my decisions about what I will allow to interrupt me. It’s shown me that the best lesson I can learn from my Dad isn’t that I need a neat lawn, it’s that I need to give myself the time to do things properly, and without distraction. The mundane parts of our life give us the opportunity to allow our brains to seek out the things that we want to be thinking about, rather than responding to other demands. Like a long walk, or a run, you may find that your best ideas will come about while vacuuming, or doing the dishes.

The other thing that I’ve found since I’ve taken better control of how I spend my attention is that the feelings of aimlessness have reduced, I’m less worried about whether I’m organised enough to have a mortgage, two kids at school, a dog and four chooks, and far less anxious about what might be happening elsewhere while I’m paying attention to something that’s important right now. It’s time we all reclaimed some of our stolen attention, and the best place to begin may be as close as your back shed.

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Dave Gaukroger provides a cautionary example for others. He continues to believe in quaint ideas like social equality, personal accountability and the power of indie pop music. Dave writes regular media commentary for Crikey’s Pure Poison blog: www.blogs.crikey.com.au/purepoison Follow him on twitter @dfg77

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