The Grass is Always Greener

How many times have we been stopped in traffic on the freeway with the lane next to us going 50 miles an hour?  So we change lanes only to have our new lane come to a complete halt and the lane we were in starts moving at 50 miles an hour.

How many times have we been in a slow line at the market and we moved to the line with only one person in it only to find that person has a stack of coupons and is writing a check?  And while we wait for coupon man, we see the people two carts behind us in the first line pay for their groceries and leave.

Catholics describe it as one of the seven deadly sins; Envy.  I call it impatience.  The old saying is “The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence”.

At some point in our lives we all feel like every time we look over the fence at our neighbor’s yard his grass is greener than ours.  So we become envious of our neighbor and impatience forces us to look for a quick solution.  The obviously quick solution is to move into our neighbor’s house because his grass is already green.

So we move in, and we continue to do what we’ve always done.  We admire the lawn for the first couple of weeks.  However, we forget to check the sprinklers, we don’t bother cutting it, grubbing it, or fertilizing it.  In essence, we ignore it like we did our lawn.  Soon, our neighbor’s lawn (our old lawn) looks better than ours.

We then lose hope and become disillusioned because our new grass doesn’t look as good as it used to, but our neighbor’s grass looks great.

What we fail to see is that our “happy-go-lucky” neighbor, with his good job, nice car, and beautifully green grass, watered his grass regularly.  He spent every weekend cutting, weeding, and grubbing it.  He fertilized it once a month, and spent little time enjoying.

We spend so much time preoccupied with the grass on the other side of the fence that we fail to see the grass on our side.  We fail to see that regular watering, fertilizing, grubbing, and cutting will make our grass look just as good.  We fail to see that it’s not the location, but our actions that makes a difference in our grass.

The bottom line is that jumping over the wall without changing your ways will only result in a new dead lawn and the cycle of frustration and envy begins anew.

So, the next time you look at your neighbor’s yard with envy, ask yourself; Am I watering my grass enough?  Am I cutting, weeding, fertilizing, and grubbing my grass as much as I should?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, go back and take care of your lawn before you try to convince others that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.