What Seven Decades Taught Me about Paying Attention

GOL Launch Week WELCOME POSTApril 6 - 11

Twenty years ago today, I put down the bottle and picked up my life.

Took control of my Type 2 diabetes.

It seemed right to start something new on the same date

— so welcome to Gardener of Life, where a retired dirt farmer pays

attention to what matters.

The Long View

Gardener of Life — Tuesday, April 7, 2026

What Seven Decades Taught Me About Paying Attention

Farming teaches you something that no classroom ever could.

You can’t hurry a field. You can’t wish a crop into health. You can walk the rows every morning, read the soil, watch the color of the leaves, notice what changed overnight — and over time, if you’re honest with yourself, the land starts to talk back.

That’s not mysticism. That’s attention. Sustained, daily, unglamorous attention.

I spent 26 years doing that. And somewhere along the way I realized the skill wasn’t really about farming. It was about seeing. About showing up to the same place, in the same way, long enough to notice what most people miss because they stopped looking.

That’s what this week was about — even if it didn’t look like it.

Monday I wrote about food as information. Wednesday about health as a system. Friday about tools that help you see what you couldn’t see before. Three different fields. One discipline underneath all of them.

Pay attention. Every day. To what goes in. To what your body does with it. To what the numbers are actually telling you.

I have Type 2 diabetes. I’m 76 years old. I recently started wearing a continuous glucose monitor — a CGM — and watching my blood sugar in real time. Not twice a day. Continuously. Food, sleep, stress, a walk around the building — all of it shows up on the screen. It’s a live radar map of my own body.

I’ve never had that before. Nobody my age grew up with that. And I’ll tell you what it feels like: it feels like finally being able to read the field.

The Long View isn’t a column about looking backward. It’s about what you can only see once you’ve been paying attention long enough. The patience that farming builds. The clarity that comes from decades of showing up.

I’m not here to tell you what to eat or which app to download. I’m here to say that the practice of paying attention — to your body, your health, your tools, your life — is worth more than any single piece of advice I could give you.

The field will tell you what it needs. You just have to keep showing up to listen.

That’s the whole game. It always has been.