Gardening is not a rational act.

Faith grows where logic fails

There's something almost foolish about gardening when you think about it logically. You invest time, money, and physical effort into a patch of earth that might get devoured by pests, drowned by rain, or scorched by drought—none of it guaranteed to produce anything worth the trouble. Yet people do it anyway, season after season, knowing full well the odds aren't in their favor.

That gap between rational calculation and what we actually do reveals something true about being human. We're not purely logical creatures weighing cost versus benefit. We garden because we need to believe in growth, in possibility, in the patience required to see something through. There's something deeply hopeful—maybe even defiant—about planting seeds you might never harvest. It's the same impulse that makes us start projects with uncertain outcomes, fall in love despite heartbreak's precedent, or commit to anything that asks us to trust the future.

Atwood's point isn't that gardening is foolish, but that the most meaningful things we do often can't be justified on a spreadsheet. They require faith, stubbornness, and a willingness to invest in something beyond our control. That willingness, irrational as it is, might actually be what makes life worth living.