21. Pruning (Grapevine Pruning)

Even though I was living in the house of a master pruner with years of experience, that didn't mean this effective skill would be passed on just by verbal advice. My first week on this job was a struggle. Waking up on a freezing morning with stiff fingers from holding pruning shears all day the day before wasn't a good feeling to start the day, especially when you knew you'd be doing the same thing as yesterday.

Day after day went by, and sometimes the bad feelings seemed to pass quickly and with little impact when I was with my group of friends who did the same kind of work. However, my heart always remembered my initial intention when I started. This job paid based on the number of tasks completed, not the number of hours worked. My income from the first week was only 60 percent compared to what I had earned in other jobs, but it gradually increased each week until the numbers looked normal. Meanwhile, I continued to transfer 300 dollars to my savings account without fail, even though in some weeks my earnings were severely low, and sometimes saving a full three hundred dollars seemed too difficult. Nevertheless, I would make additional transfers the following week to balance the numbers.

Although the initial stages of this job change weren't enjoyable, no matter how things turned out, at least now I know it wasn't what I expected. There was something more, which I hadn't realized before. That was the process of training. This required time to develop through daily repetition. Perhaps due to my past experiences, I had encountered similar situations many times, to the point where I was confident that nothing was too bad to be overcome. Even though my heart felt tormented at the time, if we analyzed things logically and observed the surrounding possibilities sufficiently, in this case, observing my surroundings meant looking at people who had done this before me and understanding that their first attempts weren't the same as their current abilities that we see now. This understanding helped my heart not worry excessively when things didn't go as expected, and instead of feeling depressed, it instilled confidence and encouraged me to continue. Observe, ask questions, and repeat. Eventually, my work speed increased steadily. Although I wasn't the fastest in the group of friends I worked with, I was much faster than my speed on the first day, and it was a performance I was satisfied with.

The indicator of this was the gradual return of revenue to normal. Sometimes, in certain weeks, I choose to work on Saturdays and Sundays, which makes the numbers look even more doubled. However, this didn't happen often. My fingers and muscles, which used to be tired and painful, didn't feel much of anything anymore, even though the workload hadn't decreased. Looking back like this, I consider this a success I've never told anyone about. But it's another time I've been able to prove to myself that the fear and fatigue of the initial period weren't a summary of the situation. If I choose to analyze it carefully and look for possibilities, what's left is patience and recognizing the small changes every day to be a little spark to recharge my spirits and keep going. It will be a continuous loop until I'm satisfied with myself.

On some days, I feel tired because the sun was hot and I was exhausted from looking at the rows of vines stretching as far as the eye could see. But my heart was racing to get it done quickly. If I feel this way, which is considered a state of discouragement almost at its peak, I will use the technique of continuing one step at a time. I will stop thinking about what I want and ignore how quickly I want the work to be finished. I won't care about any of that. I will focus only on the next step that is about to happen, which might be using the scissors to cut the branches again, pulling out the old branches again, taking another step forward. And even though I felt overwhelmed with many thoughts in my head and felt like being lazy and quitting, what I would think about was that every small step or action I took each time will lead to the house and garden in Thailand that I wanted to build. And if in the future I might not succeed, and I look back and see myself feeling discouraged like this, I will probably be very sad. When I feel this way, all I had to do was cut it again, pull it again, and take another step, understanding that these small things will eventually come together to become what I want.