Touch grass? No, touch dirt.

As I was cleaning my dish rack earlier, I noticed it accumulated things. Icky things.

The missing broken chip from my porcelain saucer that I bought from the Japanese surplus shop near Azuela Cove. A piece of eggshell from earlier morning’s soft-boiled eggs. And, of course, disgusting, grimy water.

I know, yuck. Sue me. But it is how it is.

Things get dirty, even though we’re careful not to soil them. We clean those things. They get dirty again. It’s all a cycle.

It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it led me to a thought:

To get what we want, we should be willing to get our hands dirty.

It’s just like how I wanted my dish rack to be squeaky clean and smell good. I also wanted to be free from the nagging thought of drying my plates on an unwashed dish rack.

And to make that happen, I had to scrub off grime from the skimpiest corners of that plastic dish rack with a toothbrush. I had to rinse it, despite it being bigger than my sink. I had to, despite it being mildly annoying. I did what I had to do. I had to get my hands literally dirty, even though I didn’t want to.

I realized this is a reality of the life we live—we do things we don’t like, so we can get the things we want.

Of course, some people can outsource “the scrubbing.” But for average folks like us, this is our reality.

Instead of often romanticizing the soft life, we had to be more willing to do the most annoying things that inevitably help build that life.

Because it is the most realistic move for us.

More than touching grass, we often needed to touch dirt. Not because we wanted to, but because we had to.

I’m not preaching for everyone to touch dirt.

But it’s worth remembering all the scrubbing we had to do to keep that surface squeaky clean.

It makes us more grateful for it.

So yes, touch grass… but remember to touch dirt.

After all, nothing grows in squeaky clean plastic. Even plants need dirt to live. And so do we.

Growth is hardly sterile. It’s messy. Inconvenient. And often mildly annoying.