Water the garden. By hand. What could be simpler? It was a rare sunny, windless day in Patagonia. This should just take a few minutes, I thought. I’ll help out Delgado, our chubby (Chilean nicknames are always the opposite of what the person is), old (72 years), genius (he taught himself to read at 30 and now whips through crosswords in minutes) gardener.

After half an hour wrestling with the various ten to twenty foot plastic pipes of different diameters welded together by 1-inch wide pieces of old tire tubes wrapped around the joints, I was ready. I turned on the water (the hose flew off and drenched me the first time) and started on one of two vegetable gardens that are about the size of a volleyball court. They were overflowing with potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, fava beans, beets, snap peas, and “navo,” some kind of turnipy-parsnip thing, after a warm, dry spell. As the water dribbled out of the hose at about ½ the rate of a suburban US garden hose, I slowly inched along the potatoes.

After ten minutes I’d progressed, oh let’s say, ten feet. Maybe two feet per minute. Not unlike meditation when you start squirming after the first few peaceful minutes, I started getting nervous. What had I gotten myself into? Naturally, like all good Americans, my first thoughts were how I could speed this process up. I remembered seeing some hand spritzers that fit on the end of the hose tossed in the barn. I located two, and indeed they were identical to the green and yellow ones found at Home Depot – they probably were bought at Home Depot in Miami. The only problem was that there wasn’t a single hose within 100 kilometers that had the male part to screw the spritzer onto. Remember, I’m dealing with plastic piping tossed off from some plumbing project.

OK, I thought. I’ll take this opportunity to try and “be in the moment.” It was torture. The next hour was spent continuing to try and figure out some way to screw on the spritzers while thinking of all the other projects that needed to be done – pies to be made, berries to pick, a house to clean, an article to write, weeds to be pulled… you get the picture. This is when I really began to admire Delgado and the hours that he lovingly toils in this beautiful organic garden sowing, watering, and pulling every last weed by hand.

The basis of modern society is the pursuit of a faster, better way to do everything. The premise is simple; if we can find faster ways to do things, we can do more things. Now, I will never argue that water spritzers, or a self-timing underground irrigation system for that matter, are not brilliant inventions. But somehow in the process we have exceeded the speed limit. The bane of modern society is that we now have so many opportunities, so many things to do in our chaotic lives, that we never can find enough time.

I find it so difficult to slow down and “be in the moment.” It’s easier for me to run for an hour than water a garden by hand. I believe that the need for speed has lead to dissatisfaction, depression, and disease. I will not argue that Delgado, a poor, brilliant man with little chance to escape his poverty, is better off. But he sure seems peaceful. Maybe he’s dissatisfied. I don’t know. I know he’s not stressed or depressed.

Speaking of being in the moment. There’s no arguing that our minds are always wandering to other things, but in modern society we try anything we can to fill our days and hours with distraction. Certainly television, iPods, cell phones and computers have filled up every moment of down time. Have you been around a teenager lately? Seen them squirm when there is no screen to distract them? Maybe there’s so much pressure from the fast paced world, so many things that we “should” be doing, that staring mindlessly into a screen is the only way to distract us. If you’re not watching TV, listening to music, reading, there’s a good chance you might have an opportunity to think and reflect. Unfortunately, it may be feelings of dissatisfaction that arise, rather than peace, and it’s these feelings that make us want to escape. Chileans, like most people in the developing world, are looking to the USA and admiring our way of life. How can we export the good without the bad?

As I wrote this, absorbed and, I suppose you could say, “in the moment,” my five-year old daughter, Mariela was playing in the bathtub. The wood stove was cranking I was halfway though a glass of Chilean red. I suppose you could say I was relaxed. It was so quiet in the other room that I lost track of time. It finally occurred to me that perhaps I better check to see if my kid had drowned. No, instead Mariela was in the make-believe fashion salon cutting her bangs to the quick of her forehead with her kindergarten craft scissors. Her bangs now matched the outline of her toothless grin and thus began the next chaotic “moment” in our kooky lives.