UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

                   
                                                                     

Ducks like muck!

   

       What can you say when instead of solving a problem you actually make it worse?  Last week I wrote about the satisfaction I felt when I worked hard and solved the problem of a rain soaked animal pen. It wasn’t by design that I was shoveling muck and hauling it to the compost pile on my birthday.  It was actually poor planning and procrastination.  I am reminded of a favorite Disney cartoon from my childhood.  The one where the ants work hard preparing for winter and the grasshopper dances around playing his fiddle.  I was always torn between thinking the ants were hardworking and responsible by preparing for winter, but also somewhat sorry for the grasshopper because he had a certain joie d’ vie that I admired.       

                               

       It was my procrastination that had created a slimy mess in the animal pen, and, let’s faces it; there were no ants to the rescue in this scenario.  I had succeeded in removing a lot of the muck, but when it rained again the plastic and plywood I put up failed to keep the rain out.  The problem this created was amplified by the thick layer of straw that I had thrown over the mud, because when it got wet it acted like mulch and became “one with” the dirt.  I'm sure it was suitable for making adobe bricks.  In fact, it is now a swamp in certain areas, and the worst part is the swampy sewer smell.  Having to “re-do” so much of my hard, smelly work was no fun, but it is the kind of work, like weeding, or cleaning the shower, that becomes contemplative.  As I worked, my mind seemed to latch on to a story I’d recently read in Being Mortal, about a young doctor, Bill Thomas, who took the position of medical director at a nursing home with 80 elderly residents.  He had no previous experience working with this population and was shocked at their palpable despair and inactivity.  About half were physically disabled in some way and 4 out of 5 had Alzheimer’s or some sort of cognitive disability.  He ordered scans, tests, tried changing medications and after several weeks there was little change except increased costs for treatment and a harried staff.  With his fresh eye he decided what was missing was life itself and came up with an extreme (in the world of nursing homes) plan.

                               

Chickens fiddle in the sunshine while I work!

                                     

       How he got this plan enacted is a story in itself, but the shortcut version is he introduced plants, animals and children into the lives of the residents.  The part that reminded me of my animal pen adventures with the rain was the description of the day a hundred parakeets were delivered before the cages even arrived.  The driver released them into the empty beauty salon and when the unassembled cages arrived, the doctor, his wife, the nursing director and a handful of others assembled the cages, caught the birds and delivered birds to each room.  During this chaos the elders gathered outside the salon windows with their laughter echoing through the halls.  Thomas said, “We didn’t know what the heck we were doing.  Did, Not, Know what we were doing.”

       Of course, I realize that some experience or knowledge of what you are doing is usually helpful, but sometimes “knowing” things, having all the answers, stands in the way of the exhilaration of figuring things out as you go along, the thing that brings the joie d vie that comes from discovering or creating something.  It is fairly easy to have a zest for life when you are doing something that is fun, something you enjoy, but unpleasant things, not so much.  Sometimes I think I actually make things more difficult by waiting to gather more information before I act.  I’m not suggesting this as an approach that can be applied to all things, but I guess I just want to be the grasshopper and the ant.

       You can read more about Dr. Thomas and his Green House project online, but the moral of the parakeet story is that in a study done over the following two years the use of prescription drugs, especially psychotropic drugs for agitation, decreased substantially and deaths fell by 15 percent.  And “there was something beautifully subversive,” Thomas said, “about using a medication cart that had once delivered metric tons of Thorazine to hand out Milk-Bones.”

                          

Violets enjoy the upside of animal pen waste.