Mowing grass may be tedious but it gives us time to think about stuff. Like, are we actually living in a computer simulation? And if we are, how would we know? As you bounce along on your riding mower, round and round the yard, hypnotized by the drone of the motor, you begin to struggle with an ancient paradox. In Greek mythology, the hero Theseus had a wonderful ship. But as it grew older, he gradually replaced its boards and rigging until eventually, he had replaced everything. You have to ask: was it even the same ship anymore? And now we learn that the human body is constantly replacing cells so that after 7 to 10 years, all our cells (except for neurons) are new. So, then are we no longer the same person? And if we keep getting younger cells, how come we still get older? Zen Buddhism teaches that human thinking is mostly a waste of time. Rumination is the kind of repetitive thinking, mainly about negative memories that leads from one rabbit hole to the next. Why didn’t I take Geometry in high school instead of Algebra? Geometry is practical but I never found any use for Algebra. And at the district track meet my senior year, in the 400 -meter finals, why, oh why, didn’t I notice that guy about to pass me at the finish line?

Rumination may be unproductive for people but gastronomical rumination is pretty important for cows and sheep. Having four-chambered stomachs for processing grass allows them to digest the cellulose. Humans have only a one-chambered stomach (although sometimes it seems like more) which means we can’t eat grass without getting sick.

Of course, there’s grass and then there’s grass. Wheat is a kind of grass. So is rice and barley and wild garlic. You’d hardly know it today but corn is a grass and 9,000 years ago before it was domesticated, it even looked like grass. (If you get too deep in thought while mowing, you might be brought back to reality by the colorful shredded fragments of the neighbor kid’s My Little Pony exiting the mower’s side discharge.)

Corn is America’s leading harvested crop, but turfgrass is the country’s biggest irrigated crop, occupying 2% of the landmass, over 63,000 square miles or enough grass to cover the entire state of Florida– which would turn it into one big golf course. Golf courses alone, use between 100,000 to 1 million gallons of water a week during the peak summer season. Every year, Americans spend $30 billion on our lawn grass. And we can’t even eat it. Maybe we should start growing wheat instead of grass on our lawns and golf courses. Then, instead of mowing, we could graze. Or we could evolve a four-chambered stomach like cows. Or maybe we already are cows, dreaming we are people. It’s probably good my lawn isn’t any bigger or things would get really wacky.