As we enter the holiday weekend, I’d like to draw your attention to a few reasons to love America’s greatest pastime: mowing the lawn.

1. The lawn mower’s experience of temporality is aligned with our own.

   Cars advance at high velocity, computers experience time in milliseconds, if that. But the lawn mower moves only as fast as we push it; it is bound to us, it abides with us in the moment of the cut—we can’t help but feel a sense of camaraderie.

   Humanity is complicated, but all of its humanly features involve this timeline, the one on which this lawn mower advances at our behest. We delight in the sense of evenly-split cooperation toward the task. We are proud to be partners.

2. Mowing appeals to our Adamic instinct to be the authors of the names of our world.

   Just as Adam named the beasts of the field and birds of the air, we desire our own authority in nomenclature. We are constantly tweaking the names of things, grouping things and ungrouping them, quibbling over boundaries.

   But when we are operating a lawn mower, the word “grass” is under our entire control. We can include or exclude any available object at our sole discretion, and we discover in ourselves a certain care in our discerning. If some plant should be in our way, we observe it, inspect it for its loveliness, its utility. At the moment of approach, we spell out its fate by calling it by name: grass, or not grass.

3. Mowing is a necessarily aesthetic impulse.

   This is not to say there are no practical benefits, but easier walkability and fewer pests are the ancillary goals of lawn mowing. We are engaging in the art of landscaping, of making the world around us look as we intend it. We are exerting our aesthetic will on our environment. The result is a very specific—and often unmentioned—sense of empowerment.

4. The act of mowing appeals to our affinity for weights and measures of effort.

   Mowing is a highly geometrical praxis. It takes place in a two-dimensional plane composed of lengths and breadths. This tendency toward shapeliness drives an affinity for symmetry, among other aesthetic goods.

   But in addition to shapeliness, geometry makes progress measurement in mowing quite simple. There is a certain amount of a square that remains as yet ungroomed, easily expressed as a percentage or a fraction. There is a certain heft to the clippings bag, a certain ponderous weight to be emptied and repeated. There is the counting of the bags, the estimation of their fullness. There are fuel levels, there are clearances.

   Indeed, the more analytically inclined mowers after some number of years generally come to learn the sublime pleasure given by the manipulation of blade height. Risk takers, beware.

5. Mowing is a sign of our vitality.

   In this way, it assures us against death. To mow the lawn is to exhibit some level of prosperity. The evidence in your favor is present at hand: some property (owned or rented), some grass (wild or cultivated), some time on your hands, and good enough health to mow the lawn.

   Mowing is a unique privilege of the bourgeoisie, and it affirms our place in the pack, the herd, the state. Those who mow their lawns, we feel, are safe.