People Are Like Plants

Bear with me for a few minutes here, folks. This is a stretch from graduate school or moving related subject matter, but in an email conversation with a mentor this week that was continued via text message,  I came to realize that people are like plants.

Before I totally lose you. think about it. When you were formed, you were but a tiny morsel, similar to the soil that provides the fertile ground on which you’ll grow and develop. Your root system, your heredity, determines your strength, and to a degree, it determines the way you’ll ultimately see the world and the way that you’ll grow and develop.

In a sense, I’m going through a period of realization in which I must remember my roots.  The flowering branches and the situational evidence for things that have happened in my life have simply colored my experience, all for the better, but remembering my roots is important in this period of stepping out into that field of unknown. When you hear of a plant being re-potted or simply relocated, it must have the exact same  conditions as before, but the fact that the plant is in a new place isn’t changing.

The fact that we need people, we need basic survival materials (food, shelter. clothing, water, etc.), and the fact that we need relationships with said people won’t change no matter where we are. Even though the honeybee sucks the pollen and nectar from the flower at the start, the process will make a beautiful flower, yet again, at the end.  Just as when I begin the great adventure to Kentucky, I’ll need the same things that I needed as a student in Georgia. They’ll be there; I just have to look in different places and become accustomed to the surroundings of Lexington, similar to he process for a plant that has been re-potted.

There’s been an intensely personal struggle with a relationship that everyone needs but that I don’t have for the last several years of my life, and I’ve been the plant with the motto to bloom where I’m planted because the adaptability of my root system speaks volumes. It’s not important to discuss this relationship dynamics, but I a honestly impressed with the resiliency of the human spirit to fill the void with thins that matter, things that can fill the spirit in equal or better ways.

Relocation requires resiliency, and deficit requires compensation, much like in the life cycle of a plant. Bloom where you’re planted,  and good things will blossom.