While at the farm on Friday, I found myself thinking a lot about my childhood. This is mostly because, while growing up in what could be known as Adam Rome’s greatest suburban nightmare, I pulled a lot of weeds.

I was never an indoor kid; my parents didn’t let me play video games, and we didn’t have cable until I was in middle school. We also lived in an area of Pennsylvania that was developing as I was growing up, so although I lived in a suburban neighborhood, I always was a street or two over from farmland, woods and creeks. (That’s changed since then, of course).

My friends, sisters and I spent a good amount of time roaming around those areas, but I also spent a lot of my days in our yard. I went through a phase where I was really interested in bugs, and during that time—as I dug through our mulch and observed the lawn with careful precision—my parents encouraged me to begin to do some basic yard work. I would water our tomatoes, trim some of the bushes, but mostly I pulled weeds.

Bizarrely, this was one of my favorite pastimes. I had very intense concentration when I was younger, and nothing satisfied me more than putting that to use. Focusing in on each weed, grasping it correctly to ensure I pulled it out fully, with the roots—it fulfilled some calculated part of me that itches to fix anything I can reach.

I still enjoy getting into that zone, and this was more than evident to me at the farm this week. For most of the hour and a half I was there, I (along with a bunch of other classmates) removed invasive grasses from some of Nancy’s plots. We didn’t talk too much—it was mid-afternoon, and still very hot—but I didn’t feel bored at all. My mind felt like a laser beam (how’s that for naturalistic imagery?) and I felt present in my actions for the first time that entire week. That return to the focus I used to possess when I was a kid, when distracting screens were few and far between, was relieving in a way that’s hard to talk about. I was able to revisit my short-lived love of bugs on the farm as well—as we pulled the grasses, a spider with a heaving white egg sac scuttled around us.

Halfway through my time at the farm, however, something began to bother me. It was small, but the sadness of it stuck with me for the rest of the day. When a group of us had begun work on one particular patch, Nancy told us what plants to preserve in the ground—the sweet potatoes on the vine, some lamb’s ear, and a clump of sage. The sage was hard to distinguish, considering it was toward the edge of the patch where the invasive grasses were highest, but Nancy was sure to lift up its soft leaves and display it to us. For a time after that, I kept the sage in my brain. When other people, especially people who had recently arrived, headed toward that area, I lifted the leaves and showed them, just as Nancy had done.

As we continued the mindless, quiet work, we reached a point where we remembered to check the clump of sage, but could no longer find it. When I went over to pull back the grass and reveal the clump, I realized it had been pulled already, by mistake. It looked like it was already drying and dying as it lay there. The strange thing about it was that we had any clue which of us had pulled it—it could have been any of us.

We did it mindlessly. We had thought about the sage, kept it in the front of our brains for a time, and then we just tossed it aside.

When I think about my attitude toward sustainability in general, there is something striking about this experience, and the way it encapsulates how I think and feel about environmentalism. I go through bouts of passion and education, my eyes on the issues and my individual contributions to them—but then I quickly turn to something else. Especially after reading The Bulldozer in the Countryside, I know a lot of things are environmentally “wrong” about my behaviors—I have an extra refrigerator in my room, for example—but it is hard for me to gather the will to change the way I live entirely, to keep that knowledge at the front of my thoughts.

I am relatively educated about environmental issues, but so often that knowledge is swept away by thoughts that seem more immediate and deserving of my attention. Like, yes, perhaps the concept my air conditioning unit is inherently flawed, but I need my air conditioning, and I will complain like no one else if I’m sweating too heavily indoors. I’m hopeful this class will help me unpack these obsessions of mine (namely my obsession with precise comfort) and allow me to redirect these feelings. No one would pull the sage if they knew what they were doing was wrong—but they could do it if they’re not looking.