I was upset. As I drove into our driveway, I noticed an aluminum can and a paper bag full of waste from a fast-food restaurant on the ground directly beneath my mailbox. Someone had dropped their litter onto my farm.

Granted, we live along a well-traveled paved road that is the prime route for many folks headed on weekend camping and boating trips to the lake. One day, while sitting in my tractor at the end of the driveway, waiting for what seemed like a 10-minute train of campers, boaters and pickups to pass so I could get onto the road, one traveler brazenly threw out their trash right in front of me.

When they tell you to “pack out your trash,” that isn’t what they mean. Our local 4-H club heads out each spring and walks our road, picking up trash. It is mind-boggling how much is thrown out along our road, in many ways desecrating our pretty little valley along Bow Creek. Maybe there is just too much litter in our lives.

Time to declutter

That thought probably transfers over to our farming operations. I’m not thinking about the physical litter that drops on my driveway, but maybe the clutter of those unnecessary things that take our attention away from our farms and families.

In some cases, anxiety about the future of farm markets, input prices, machinery breakdowns and financial worries can clutter our minds so much that they prevent us from acting. We don’t know what to do with that clutter when it clouds our judgment.

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In the coming new year, there are plenty of things to worry about, and that doesn’t even account for personal concerns for the mental and physical well-being of our families, farm employees and neighbors. Worrying about the litter in our lives can be crushing.

I’m not a psychologist, nor was my dad; but Dad was a farm philosopher. And he had simple advice during challenging times that always struck the right tone and helped ease that paralyzing worry littering our lives.

3 tidbits of advice

“Let’s get started.” When we had something on our list to do that was unpleasant or he knew would be difficult, he didn’t want us to dwell on it. He wanted to get started solving the problem or completing the task. It might be moving cattle on the road, which was always challenging. It might be fixing a piece of machinery that we knew would be costly and take time to repair.

“It won’t fix itself,” he would say. And with those unpleasant tasks, sometimes the hardest part is to motivate ourselves to begin.

“One thing at a time.” His philosophy was to approach our worries in a way that pieces them out. Choose the most daunting of the tasks and work on that item first. Once that is completed, go on to the next thing. Don’t look at the long list of tasks or lengthy list of worries as a whole unit. Break it up into parts that can be tackled individually, one at a time. When anxiety strikes, it is often recommended to take one day at a time, one hour at a time and, if necessary, one minute at a time.

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“First thing’s first.” Dad was big on keeping priorities straight. For him, it was God, family and the farm, in that order. Recognizing our priorities helps us maintain balance in our lives and spend our time and energy on the most important things — helping us weed out the clutter.

I have tried, often unsuccessfully, to follow these tidbits of advice in my own life. My goal moving into the new year is to try to take the litter out and declutter our lives as much as possible from things that are not important to the farm, my work or our family.

Only one piece of advice comes from me: If you take out the trash in your life, be sure not to drop it on someone else’s driveway.