“Just Do It” Goes For Farming and Ranching Too

When he was 95 years old Scott Nearing, who has been described as the great-granddaddy of the back-to-the land movement, was speaking to a group about homesteading and gardening. Of all that he said that day the most profound statement was this: "If you want to garden just do it." Just think about this for a minute, if you want to do it, just do it. And this was years before that big sport shoe company turned just do it into a commercial slogan. How many of us have thought of something that we wanted to do and thought of all the reasons not to do it so we didn’t. While there are things that Scott Nearing said and wrote that I really do not believe or accept, the simplicity of most of it, if nothing else, makes you think. All of us have dreams of how we want to live, but be truthful are you living the life you want to live? This is not intended to be another discussion about finding our inner self or anything of the sort. The question is if you want to do something why not do it? I have learned long ago that the want to is so much more important than the how to. My Daddy said to my brothers and me over and over again, "Do something even if it’s wrong." His belief was that if you did it wrong you could figure a way to fix it. He believed that it wasn’t a mistake until there was no way to correct it. But on the other hand he insisted that we do it right