This post was first written for the blog of my girlfriend and I. My original intention in writing it was to raise our awareness about how the things that we put our time, energy, focus, and effort shape our world not just in what we personally experience, but in our activities we influence external circumstances, including objects in our personal and common environments as well as having impacts on others’ experiences of people in general and us as individuals:
"All day, we put our time, focus, and effort into countless small tasks. When we exert our effort, there are effects which form the character of the world around us, but most directly, our own lives and by extension the lives of those who interact with us.
Throughout our lives, from the time of childhood through our parents, schooling, and other mediums, we form ideas about what we must do and what we would like to happen. Sometimes, the visions of what we would like are based on learned conceptions of what we must (or must not) do, rather than being free expressions of our will.
Very rarely do people consider the manner in which their time, focus, and efforts will effect their world, particularly when considered accumulatively over time and in conjunction with the actions, habits, practices, and qualities of other people and things.
For example, one is raised and educated to seek employment, and often the employment which people get is based off of the needs and availability of jobs markets whose demands reflect those of outside institutions. One could conceive of an individual working their entire life for a company whose impact on the planet is not contributing towards a world which the worker wishes to live in, despite being dependent on employment for the satisfaction of survival needs.
Our system of institutions and the direction of human effort and capability are no longer directed towards things like the survival or even the well-being of individuals, including those whose work keeps the institution in practice.
The vision of Wäderby Orchard is to reconnect human effort with well-being, but to do so we must reconceive our relationship with the natural world, ourselves, and each other. What I mean by reconceiving our relationship with the natural world is that we need to understand that human life grows out of, is sustained by, and thrives with the natural world. It is always from the Earth which we extract any raw material. It is from the Earth which vegetation grows which can be harvested as food as well as materials such as wood, soap lather, and much more.
By reconnecting ourselves to nature, we can not only circumvent high degrees of resource waste, but get in tune with both of the planet and cosmos from which we were created."
This is a link to the original post: https://waderbyorchard.wordpress.com/2021/06/18/effort-and-effect/