Tend To Your Garden

Sometimes it feels like life is happening to us. We’ll stub our toe, break a nail, get cut off in traffic, or someone refuses to hold an elevator despite our hustle. If we’re not careful, we will take personal offense to happenstance, internalizing these inconveniences and counting them as another score of personal hardships. There goes another drop (or two) in the bucket. Everything feels like a lesson learned or worse. It’s another dreaded, “You should have known better” or “I told you so”. Those are the phrases that haunt the people who have been let down too often. We strive to find the good, but opt for realism to maintain our sanity. “I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist,” we say. What we don’t realize is that we’ve activated defensive pessimism. It becomes our battle cry, placated disposition, and ultimately the coping mechanism of choice. 

So, how do we merge our acceptance of the bad while remaining hopeful for the good to appear? We become the realists we claim to be. Consider the rose. It is widely accepted that although lovely, roses come with thorns. Although unpleasant, thorns serve a purpose. They ward off herbivores, help with water retention, and help the rose compete with other plants for resources. We could get lost in why thorns are needed. However, trying to qualify your hardships to match the reality of rose warfare will leave you more discouraged than encouraged. Instead, I beckon you to lean into realism. Thorns exist. Roses do their best work navigating life with, around, through, and despite them. As you must. 

There is good and bad. Both exist with and without cause. Sometimes it’s just not that deep. What should be deep is how deeply we process each hardship personally. Get up, friend. Determine what your garden needs. Find your light, cultivate your soil/soul, and seek out the purest water you can. Your thoughts fuel your body, and cheap fuel will never do.