I made valances for our patio door and office window back a year ago, with the window valance still needing to be installed. These added (or will add) a nice finished look to the space. But I had way overbought the material for the valances and had several yards left over. (I don’t think it was very expensive.) So I planned to make throw pillows from the remaining fabric and bought some coordinating stuff to use for trim. I’d come up with a complicated method for making the pillow covers, with mitered, contrasting flanges. One pillow hadn’t come out very well, which was discouraging, but then I decided that yesterday was The Day to get going on a new method that I was sure would work. Folks, let me tell you: I spent hours on putting together the first one, thinking that I’d get the procedure all figured out and then would be able to make the rest of them fairly quickly. Well, ha. When I finally got it done the flange was all (as my mother would say) whoppajawed. It didn’t lie smoothly. And I realized that the pillows themselves were completely unnecessary. Unlike the valances, the pillows weren’t going to add much to the space beyond a certain amount of clutter. I was just wasting my time.

So for once I resisted a logical fallacy, this time the “sunk cost” one, which says that you should keep going on something if you’ve already invested a lot in it. (So people keep pouring money into bad investments instead of cutting their losses and getting out before they lose any more.) I was inspired by something I’d read by Ruth Stout, who wrote several books about gardening back in the 1950s and 1960s. notably How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back in which she talks about the joys of mulching. Even if you have zero interest in ever planting a single seed you should read at least one of her books; she was one of the world’s great characters.

Anyway, she tells a story in that book about canning blueberry Juice. The farm where she and her husband lived had tons of blueberry bushes that produced tons of big, beautiful berries. There were far too many to eat fresh (and apparently she didn’t like them all that much), and I don’t think she had a big freezer at the time. So she came up with idea of making juice from them and then canning it. What you’re supposed to do with blueberry juice I don’t know, but she and several friends carried out the process, ending up with quarts and quarts of blueberry juice after a long, grueling process of mashing, straining, and boiling bushels of the pesky critters. It was a total pain. Next year the blueberries produced a bumper crop again. And again she and her helpers pitched in to make a new batch of juice. They had it all made and ready to can when Ruth decided, “We’re not going to do this.” She threw out all of the juice. Her helpers were horrified. They’d done all that work! Why couldn’t they just go ahead and do the final step, the canning? But she was adamant. If they went ahead and canned the juice, being able to see the fruit (ha) of their labor, they’d be unable to stop themselves from going through the whole process again the next year. This way, she’d stopped the whole horrible process in its tracks. As she said, “Everyone who heard that story thought I was crazy. I think it was one of the most intelligent things I’ve ever done. It worked.”

So last night I looked at that horrible pillow and thought of the hours of work it would take to make something presentable, and something inside me snapped. ‘I’m just going to throw that extra material, and this messy pillowcase, away. That way I’ll never be tempted again to embark on this complete waste of time.’ And so I did. The items are out in the trash can right now, waiting for today’s pickup.

But wasn’t that a waste? Here’s the thing: the minute I bought too much material I’d wasted it. I wasn’t careful about measuring, giving myself a goodly margin of error. So then that extra just created the situation where even more waste would happen, with my unnecessary time and effort. It was time to stop the bleeding.

And since this is a mindful eating blog, let me point out that we do this type of thing with food all the time: I’ve bought too much, or bought junk food, or snack food, or candy, and now I think I have to eat it up, when in reality I just need to throw it out.  As with the extra fabric, so with the food: the minute I bring something home that I shouldn’t have bought in the first place it’s wasted. So let’s not compound the waste by eating it. Instead, I need to make a real effort to use up the good, nutritious food that I buy and then lazily don’t eat. Right now there’s a bag of spinach in the fridge that I need to use up. How many other bags of salad greens have I wastefully let go bad and then thrown out? More than I like to think about.

Let’s all channel our inner Ruth Stout and stop doing things that don’t need to be done–and eating things that don’t need to be eaten.

(If you’d like to read an interesting article about Ruth, here it is: “More vegetable, less work: Lessons from the mother of mulch“) And here’s a charming video (with Russian–I think–subtitles, but just ignore them) made when Ruth was 92, explaining her methods of gardening:

Sometimes It’s Better to Abandon a Project