You Are a Whirlpool · Rule III

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  1. The five rules
  2. I
  3. II
  4. III
  5. IV
  6. V
A watered tree heavy with fruit beside an unwatered bare tree; a cat fed at the gate
Rule III: A watered tree heavy with fruit beside an unwatered bare tree; a cat fed at the gate
Rule III of five · Feed

Whatever you feed, grows.

A letter from Justin Hartfield. About 3 minutes.

Feed a stray cat once and it comes back tomorrow. Feed it for a week and it sleeps on your step. Feed it for a month and it’s your cat, whether you decided that or not. The cat didn’t read your mind. It just went where the food was. Everything alive does that, and most of what’s inside you does it too.

Think of your mind as a field of tall grass. Walk the same way across it every day and you wear a path. Keep walking it and the path becomes a road, the kind your feet take on their own while you’re thinking about something else. Stop walking it and the grass slowly closes back over. There is nothing you need to do to forget a road. You just have to stop feeding it.

Your attention is the feeding. Whatever you look at, think about, talk about, or do, you are feeding, and it grows. That includes the things you don’t want. Worry about a problem for an hour and you have not shrunk the problem. You’ve fed it. You have worn the path to it a little deeper, so that tomorrow your feet find it faster.

Now, the part of you that aims your attention is small. I call it the Pointer. It’s the one lever you truly hold, and it gets tired fast. Autopilot, the part that runs without you, is huge by comparison. Autopilot would happily walk the old roads all day. The Pointer can’t fight it, but it doesn’t need to. It just has to choose, over and over, which way to walk this time. Roads are built one walk at a time, and so are you.

Three things follow from this.

First, you can’t feed everything. The Pointer is small, so you have to choose. A person who feeds twelve things a little grows twelve weeds. A person who feeds two things every day grows two trees. Fewer things, fed daily, beats many things fed now and then. This is true of skills, of friendships, and of the kind of person you turn out to be.

Second, this works on people. What you feed in someone grows. Point out what a person does wrong and you’ll get more of it, because you’ve put it at the center of the room. Notice what they do right, out loud, and you’ll get more of that. I’ll say the strange part plainly: being happy with the people in your life is cheaper than fighting them. Fighting costs energy every single day. Being happy with someone costs almost nothing, and it feeds the best in them. That isn’t softness. It’s good accounting.

Third, your feelings are roads too. A feeling you feed, by replaying the thing that caused it, gets wider. A feeling you let pass through you, the way water passes through a whirlpool, stays a feeling and doesn’t become a road. You don’t have to fight a feeling. You just don’t have to feed it.

Try this today, and keep it up for a week.

At the end of each day, write down where your hours actually went. Not where you meant them to go. Where they went. Next to that, write where you thought they went. The gap between those two columns is the most useful thing you’ll learn about yourself this month. Then pick the one thing you say matters most, and give it the first good hour of tomorrow, before anything else gets fed.

One line to remember

Your attention is the water. Be careful what you pour it on.