Life Lessons From a Houseplant
If you’re falling apart inside your life right now, read this.
I moved my favorite plant to a new, less sunny spot in the house and she fell apart. There is nothing inherently wrong with my plant. She simply fell out of alignment with what she needs.
There’s a life lesson here.
If you’re falling apart inside your life right now, there is nothing inherently wrong with you. You’re just out of alignment with what you need.
We have it inside out and backwards a lot of the time when it comes to understanding our lives. Maybe that’s because we’re knee deep in the business of living them, too entrenched to pull the lens back and see things clearly.
Or maybe it’s because we’ve learned, habitually, to blame ourselves whenever something isn’t working.
This is like standing in a deadzone trying to make a call and blaming the phone for not working. There is nothing wrong with the phone. It can’t get the signal. If we spend our time and energy fussing with the phone we’ve missed the point completely.
We need the sun. We need the signal. We are in a collaborative relationship with life, not a hostage/terrorist dynamic. Life is trying to talk to us, guide us, point things out to us all the time, day in and day out. But we’re distracted. We’re looking the wrong way. We’re shooting the messenger, missing the message altogether.
When I was growing up in the 80’s, my neighbor drove a rusty old Buick Skylark with a bumpersticker that said: Life’s A Bitch. I never understood that when I was younger. Once at the mall I saw a riff on the same sentiment on a person’s t-shirt: Life’s A Bitch And Then You Marry One. “So life is a bitch,” I thought. “Like a crabby, disillusioned housewife, smoking Parliments and drinking Tab from a can. Hmmm.”
A better, truer line of merch would have been: Life Is A Blank Page. What You Project Onto It Is Up To You, Babe.
Or: Life Is Rooting For You, You’re Just Too Busy Sabotaging Yourself To Notice And Cooperate.
Perceiving ourselves as “broken” and then making our healing about “fixing” ourselves is a path of pain. Understanding our needs, accepting that we have them and then making our healing about standing in alignment with the feedback and nourishment that life offers in order to meet them is a path of freedom, joy and self empowerment.
Which one will you choose for yourself?
