I Get To vs. I Have To
On Sunday afternoon I walked down our street in Vancouver under a thick canopy of October leaves. It was a cool, damp fall day, and the big boulevard trees had dropped a heavy layer of yellow and orange across every front yard, sidewalk, and parked car on the block.
Well, almost every yard.
Halfway down the street, I stopped and took two photos—one looking down the block, and one looking back from the other side.
Looking down the block: fallen leaves right up to the property line, then spotless green grass and sidewalk.
Looking back from the other side: cleared right to the stone wall and wrought-iron fence, where the leaves start all over again.
In the middle of a block completely carpeted in autumn leaves, one neighbour had cleared his entire front yard, the concrete sidewalk, and the city boulevard lawn strip right out to the curb. Not roughly cleared—completely cleared, right to the exact property line on both sides, like someone had drawn a ruler across the grass.
Nobody has to rake the boulevard grass to perfection in late October when half the leaves are still up in the branches waiting to fall tomorrow. If you frame a job like that as "I have to," you either put it off until November or you kick a narrow path down the middle of the sidewalk and call it a day.
Standing there looking at that clean strip of green, it hit me that this neighbour is not doing it because he has to. He gets to. He takes pride in his home, he owns his fifty feet of the street, and he actually wants to be out there doing it well.
I have been thinking about that one-word shift—from have to to get to—across the rest of my life lately. You can feel the difference immediately in how you show up for a squash match, how you tackle a pile of household decisions, or even how I treat this blog and the project notes on this site: not as a real-time chore I am obligated to feed every day, just a running tally I get to update when there is something worth sharing.
Obligation drains your attention before you even pick up the rake. Ownership gives it back, right down to the property line.