The Three Gardens

When I look at what any college toastmasters club can be, I view this as three different end-states all resulting from what emerges form a combination of vision, leadership, place, timing, values, talent and this list can be in endless forms, all prescribing to each uniqueness.

The three gardens are :

The Garden of Fools
The Garden of Cultivation
The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Fools
One of the unique educational qualities of a Toastmasters program is that it is not a pass/fail system.  People can speed through the program and receive its highest designation within 2 years or they can go through the program over 6 to 8 years, or they keep recycling i.e. on reaching the highest designation, they resharpen the saw and start the whole program again.

Just because a member fast-tracks his program does not necessarily create a garden of fools, for their are sometimes highly functional and exceptional members who have a high bandwidth for knowledge assimilation and don't want a "slow" experience.  The Garden of Fools is more about those who have simply done this because of an ego need, in that they have made Toastmasters their personal identity rather than their continuous learning or education.

In the wider world, the Garden of Fools is well noted when people wonder how a particular person rose to a level of authority beyond their competency or leadership level.  The election of George W. Bush is interesting not because he was a playboy that became a president, but because his younger brother Jeb Bush was actually a politician and way more competent as a leader, but George W. Bush was at the right place at the right moment, whereas Jeb Bush ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong moment. 

Another example of the Garden of Fools is Peter Sellers last movie role where he plays Chance the Gardener.  Chance is a gardener who never left his home and served his master until he died. Upon death he was evicted.  In coming into the world a total fool, a series of accidental situations have mistaken by some as a worldly fellow - Shirley McClain's character becomes his chief supporter as she misunderstands thinking he said his name is Chancey Gardener.  Then the misunderstandings play themselves all the way to him meeting the President of the USA.

The genius of "Chancey Gardener" is simply assumed because men in power have limited time to make assessments when their schedules only provide a short window to observe any particular individual.   When a system of leadership involves social compliance and short-term thinking, by the time the leader has realized their mistake, they will now not backtrack - for such a realization means people will look at their judgement and discernment as foolish.  This further angers those who were either better consultants, advisors and leaders.   When I am in a Garden of Fools, I do not criticize it, nor do I attempt to change it - my best course of action is to leave it and find a new garden.

The Garden of Cultivation

The most famous ending to what is treated as philosophical novel must be Voltaire's Candide where the book ends with the line "cultivate your garden" 

Candide is the funniest book I have ever had the chance to read and it is an enlightening wisdom regarding all our huffings and puffings about success and all the philosophies we think we need to make a life.  In Candide the dirty hand of hard realities keep getting in the way of idealistic conceptions and so the absurdities flow through the book, until we get to the end of the book and that last line is not just an exaltation to lead a life of cultivation but a resignation that whatever we think we would like to happen, one cannot go wrong with cultivating our own garden. 

The garden of cultivation then teaches me that how life turns out is nothing like the philosophical outlooks we pour forth sometimes week after week.  If I don't contribute to a successful club experience, if things do not turn out at all as I expected, the true joys in life are those that are readily accessible to me.  To think freely like this is one of those joys, to know that my designs are not designs that I foist onto the world and want others to emulate is another joy, to understand that I am thinking without desiring to change others - or to make people our personal project is another joy, but such joys are short-lived once we take our own ego too seriously, begin creating plans that have no basis to be other than we should count our fortune and blessings if they happen to succeed despite of us and not because of us.

In the garden of cultivation is the one rare thing most people seek and work way too hard for, which is the virtue in happiness.  Happiness does not arise from the outcomes of our actions or the marks of our success.  It is something that is either a resident mental state of being or it is a forced subscription based on the expectations of other people - expectations which we absolutely have little control - and so the story of Candide plays out as character in that book meet cruel fates and ruinous ends all on dining on a philosophical construct of happiness, rather than make happiness one's actual living reality - a reality that is actually found in virtues.

The Garden of Eden

The final garden is what dreams are made of.  If we are capable of an imagination and combine that with an appreciation of the magic in life,  we do not come from a delusional place of magical thinking but in the joyful place of magic making.  This magic making is wrapped around in one word and that word is appreciation.  If the plant is imagination and the soil is appreciation, then we are not Chance the Gardener, we are moving Eastward into Eden.

The reality of this garden is not realizable for most.  Organizations that become a Garden of Eden can be as rare as a hair on a bald man's head.  These moments of magic are not magical thinking because they are formed from exceptional situations and if we appreciate the potential for these possibilities of magic - then we have hit the oil well of our dreams.  Hitting such a gusher is low probability and while it is nice contemplating this, trying to live this contemplation as if it is sure reality is no law of attraction, it is another chapter in rollicking reading of Candide.

James Dean was portrayed in a gusher moment in the movie Giant where he was a worker on a parcel of land that he had inherited, but just because our well comes in, does not mean that we have found our Garden of Eden 

A James Dean role with him covered him in role does not hide the actual reality of his life, that he became a cult figure when he was sadly killed in a car crash at the age of 24.  While he was driving a sports car to a race track at the time, he was not speeding - it was the other driver that killed him, and at the time James Dean took time out to create "safe driving" adverts for young people.  What is the point of such fame if the person made famous lives not to enjoy his Garden of Eden - instead James Dean story is a profound reality that wisdom works in strange ways.

James Dean only made three films, one being Rebel without a Cause and the other was East of Eden.  In East of Eden James Dean's character is looking for love and is caught between values of perfection set by his father - even though the father hides from him a terrible imperfect secret, that is mother is actually the owner of a whorehouse :

Rebel without a Cause continues this angst of youth and perhaps his most famous film, but East of Eden carries with it how difficult it is in life to create a Garden of Eden moment, for the garden at any particular time can be filled with fools, or go relatively uncultivated.  Yet this is where we hold a dream in our own hearts - because even though creating that Garden is against all odds, if we don't have that dream to fire our imagination, we settle for far less and we close our imagination to all that moves us away from the possibility of a Garden of Eden.

Whenever we hear about people talking about the "Golden Age" or someone holds the promise out of a Garden of Eden, that becomes an ambition and ambition ironically blinds us.  If virtue gets us to happiness it is because of a blessing that somehow got shared.

How little that happens is a stark reality.  That it happens is what fascinates us.  A Garden of Eden can be created anywhere, even in a College Toastmasters club but the forces that come together to create that are not in our control - it is when life begins to take on a life of its own. 

How then to explain how four men in Liverpool came together to form the Beatles.  At any single step of that formation, just one missing piece of the jigsaw would have ended the possibility - but for a time that Garden of Eden moment did occur and the world then had the story of John, Paul, George and Ringo.  The Beatles were not a certainty, just as the fact that we each got born was far from a certainty - magic happened and then things took a life of their own.  If that is a blessing we encounter, then cherish it, but most of all don't mess up the garden, because there are more Candide stories than there are Garden of Eden stories.

For John Lennon, the success of the Beatles was not his Garden of Eden moment, that came with the birth of his son Sean - and just when he had entered that Garden, a cruel act of fate took it away from him - as a crazed man wanting to be John Lennon shot him dead.

What this means to me is that there is no single Garden of Eden moment, but in all the gardens that operate in my life, I do try to find my own Eden.  I have been blessed to have been a part of one Garden of Eden which is my family - and this I recognize as an absolute blessing, and in extending that Eden, it is to find another type of family value in a college toastmasters club. 

"