Below is a story from Boyd K. Packer about his days on a farm and experience, turned analogy, about channeling our thoughts.
“When I was about ten years old, we lived in a home surrounded by an orchard. There never seemed to be enough water for the trees. The ditches were always fresh-plowed in the spring, but after the first few irrigating turns, the weeds would spring up in the ditch bottoms and soon they were choked with water grass, June grass, and redroot. One day, in charge of the irrigating turn, I found myself in trouble. As the water moved down the rows choked with weeds, it carried enough leaves and grass and debris to lodge against the weed stocks and flood the water from the ditch. I raced through the puddles, trying to build the banks up a little higher, to keep the water in the channel. As soon as I had one break patched up there would be another one flooding over in another spot.
About that time an older brother came through the lot with a friend of his who was majoring in agriculture. He watched me for a moment, then with a few vigorous strokes of the shovel he cleared the weeds from the dampened ditch bottom and allowed the water to course through the channel he had dug.
“You will waste the whole irrigating turn patching up the banks,” he said. “If you want the water to stay on its course, you have to make a place for it to go.”
I have learned that thoughts, like water, will follow the course if we make a place for them to go. Otherwise, we may spend all our time frantically patching up the banks and may find that our “turn” is over and that we have wasted the day of our probation.”
Source: “That all may be edified,” Boyd K. Packer
