I love plants. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I really love plants. Houseplants, flowers, edible plants. I even like weeds–dandelions are good except in their seedy stage, clover smells so sweet and fresh. Even Creeping Charlie has cute little purple flowers. And I’m endlessly fascinated by how plants grow. It blows my mind a little that you can just throw a seed in some damp soil and eventually end up with pounds and pounds of tomatoes, for example. Or that you can take a spider plant baby, stick it in damp soil, and it will just become its own independent entity. How weird would it be if humans could just, like, cut off a toe and grow another human from it. I mean, it would be handy to have multiple versions of myself so I could do all the things I want to do in life, although I wouldn’t really get the whole experience unless all of my clones could share a consciousness. But that would get really confusing, like if one of me had to be at work, and another was trying to sing or play my guitar–where would our collective mind focus? But if all of us couldn’t experience things together, what would be the point of having more than one of me? We would all have FOMO on what the others of us were doing. And what if mutations happened in the replication process, and not all of the Mes turned out the same? I could end up in a Multiplicity situation–does anyone remember that Michael Keaton movie? It wasn’t great. These are things I think about. But now I’ve gone off topic–back to plants.
I used to not really like succulents. They didn’t seem do much, and I didn’t really get them. Give me a pothos and I can grow a jungle with it in a few months. But a succulent? They mostly just stay the same. I mean, they grow a little here and there, but they’re not that exciting as far as plants go. I know that’s an unpopular opinion, especially in the last few years when every Pumpkin Spice girl wannabe influencer has a succulent on her minimalist desk with basically no other color anywhere except maybe rose gold. Seriously, I just Googled “desk decor, succulent” and these were the first two rows of results after the ads. It’s a thing.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with succulents on minimalist desks, or the absence of color, or even Pumpkin Spice girl wannabe influencers–if that’s your jam, it’s your jam. Who am I to judge? And sometimes, things that you thought you didn’t like have a way of getting to you. I’ve been given couple of succulents in the last couple of years and…well, they’ve grown on me. I mostly ignored them at first, other than watering every once in a while, and for months they showed no signs of growth at all. But now in the last month or two, as the days have gotten longer and I’ve been a little more regular with my watering routine, they’ve grown a little bit. And I have to say, those tiny little shoots of growth are exciting–probably in part because they take a while.
And that got me to thinking about personal growth, and how sometimes people go months, or even years, just kind of existing. Nothing really changes much for them. They eat and sleep and go about their days, but they mostly just stay the same. And that’s okay. But then, sometimes, they start to make tiny little changes and suddenly you notice they’ve grown. And that growth is exciting. And maybe it just comes in little spurts here and there, but it all adds up, and over time you can start to become the kind of person you want to be. Whatever kind of being you are, you’re valuable. And whatever kind of growth you’re able to manage is better than no growth at all. So if you’re a pothos, go ahead–fill the room with your vine-y glory. But if you’re a succulent, that’s good too–grow when you can, but take breaks when you need to. And make sure you’re getting what you need to grow (water, decent food, plenty of sleep, sunshine, encouragement, etc.). Your little changes will add up and just like that you’ll be better than you were before.
growingmoxie.com 