Because I've already chewed up my seed catalogues with constant browsing, I've been getting my farming fix by reading about other people's experiences. I'm reading The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball right now. It's a great read and I'm really enjoying it. One of the lines caught my attention yesterday and I just can't seem to let it go. The main characters were talking about the possible failure of their new farming venture.

"....I would ask Mark if he really thought we had a chance. Of course we had a chance, he'd say, and anyway, it didn't matter if this venture failed. In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us. You don't measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right." (p. 77)

I think that this reasoning seems so right to me because sometimes I feel like we are spinning our wheels. I know some of our friends are clucking their tongues and shaking their heads at our decisions: not just making all our foods from scratch, but trying to produce the food from scratch as well; some think the way we are bringing up our kids is almost child abuse ("You make your kids get up for swim practice at 6 in the morning? In the summer?"); moving steadily and constantly toward being debt free instead of buying the next great thing on credit; keeping the house temperatures set at 60 in the winter instead of 75; washing dishes by hand instead of using the dishwasher......these are just a couple of weird things we do that are "different". And they are sometimes hard. But we are moving in the direction we feel is right both for us as a couple and for our family. It's hard and it's right.