Charlie Munger: Incentives

Incentives to have a pretty landscape?  Few.  For broad swaths, seemingly, none.  Note, a tidy landscape is fine or perhaps maintaining the status quo, but that's not the hunt here.
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What's the hunt?  Total Dr. Sacks, an awakening, bearing witness to another's self-aware choice to broaden their horizon beyond tidy and the status quo. 
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E.M.Forster circled it well in A Room With a View, Mr. Beebe notes Miss Honeychurch, Lucy, playing piano with wild passion, yet her daily life a dull drama.  When will Lucy match her music?
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When will you?  Have you?  Remember the moment of choice?
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'I want my landscape to be a pretty backdrop to living', seems wildly too much to ask, if you were merely to drive about noticing landscapes.  I want to look out every window of my home and think, 'wow',.
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Who gets this 'landscape as backdrop to life' mostly?  Largest segment hiring me to design their garden as a place fun to be in, and a backdrop, women about to have their first grandchild.  Merely empirical evidence from a 30+ year career in Garden Design.  That is a wow, and you can't make this stuff up. 


Pic, above, here.
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Ironically, science has been proving we 'need' Nature as a backdrop to our lives for optimum health, since we've moved away from agrarian/pastoral to industrialized culture.  Microbiomes, and etc, the good health incentive. 
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More, a good landscape improves property values.  A landscape as beautiful backdrop to your life inherently includes placements of plants, lowering HVAC bills.  There you have it, the money motive incentive.
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There you have it, incentives to a beautiful landscape as a backdrop to your life.  Whooooooppppppiiiii, my dear friend, and WWII veteran, Johnny Colbert would say.
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No matter your era or persuasion, we are all placed on this Earth after Providence first made it a beautiful garden.  It didn't have to be beautiful, merely functional, yet it's beautiful too.  Why?   
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Charlie Munger, "Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." 
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We live in a culture of show me, don't tell me.  Until the 19th century, agrarian/pastoral, individual lives were about developing character, afterward the macro culture, now industrialized, became a culture of personality.  We're less than 2 hundreds years, after a prologue of thousands of years, navigating our lives not planted in Earth, but air layered to the construct of our own making, not Nature's. 
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Landscape, above, is humorous, evoking both charismatic personality, and pastoral beauty.  No surprise the photographer knew this made great art.
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Something odd and wildly unexpected arrived, creating my own beautiful landscape as a backdrop to my life.  My garden is my friend.  Literally, my friend.  Time passed from this epiphany, and realized more, my garden is my Friend.  Crazy statement I know.  Remember well, in my 20's someone said to me, "No one can live without art."  With my beautiful landscape's teaching I know her statement is more correctly, "No one can live without Art."
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More crazy, getting to this layer of Life, I've found my tribe.  Going so deeply inward, connections are made outwardly.
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Want a beautiful backdrop landscape to your life?  Heads-up, having the epiphany, then making it happen, will take time, but sprinkle great joys along the timeline. 
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There is a large portion of women at my speaking engagements with an entirely different reason for wanting to create a beautiful landscape as backdrop to their lives.  Misery.  Life events have conspired, taking joy away.  They've come to the lecture, knowing this is how they are getting their joy back.  Oh my the tears I've been honored to bear witness to, in those moments.  Almost always in a hallway outside the auditorium.  Words tumbling out with tears, stories, told disjointed, freedom to finally let the misery go.  Nancy Sinatra, "These boots are made for walking.", and I know where those boots are walking to, and from.  Yes, I get the juicy bits of their stories too, but won't go there.  Their tears begin falling from the misery, and end falling in joy.  Perfect art film moment.  Changing misery to joy, great incentive. 
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Garden & Be Well,    XO T