The saga continues…

A few years ago, I wrote about a particular plant in my living room (actually I wrote about it twice). I’ve had this particular plant for quite a long time- through three apartments, six roommates, one pot.
     I had written about how, through all these years, all these changes in my life, the plant had remained in the same pot, for fear (well my fear, not the plant’s) that repotting it would kill it. As is my wont, I likened it to we humans and how we innately fear change as something dangerous and often life-threatening.
     For whatever reason it might have been (and yes, noting that possibly by my fearful refusal to repot it contributed to the transpiring events), later in the plant’s journey, it sent out a shoot in the opposite direction to right itself, as the majority of its branches, and therefore weight, were leaning to the other side, threatening to topple it right off its pedestal. Then, I had likened it to the inherent desire for all life forms to seek balance.

As for the current episode in this plant’s continuing saga: I finally repotted it. It did ok. For a while. Until it didn’t. Essentially my worst fears about the plant’s future if I was to break it out of its root-bound existence into its possible fullest version of itself were realized: it died.

And that was and is the risk, isn’t it? That no matter what hopes we have to take the leap, break out of our ruts, try something new, we can, and often do, fail. And yes, sometimes, even tragically so.
      To deal with the actual, raw, brutal reality of life as it is, as much as we might hate it, is part of the human (and I guess also the plant) experience. As much as we might always hope or seek out safety and certainty (also so human (and also plantlike?) of us), happily moving forward in a somewhat steady direction, we are often called to send out a shoot in the opposite direction of our so-called steady growth with no rhyme or reason. And, yes, sometimes, to our despair, it ends with us toppled over, face-down in our own dirt.

But what other option is there really? For, even if we were to continue to move in the same direction, year after year after year, eventually that too will come to an end. Wouldn’t it be then better to shoot out branches in every single direction imaginable, truly experiencing everything that life (human, plant or otherwise) has to offer, even if it ends in failure? And even when it ends in success? For what is a full life, if not that?
     And, the offshoot (pardon the pun) is that there really is no end. That even though my plant has died, it had two little leaf-filled branches that I trimmed and put into their own new pot. Will they survive? Will they suffer the fate of their parent plant? Who knows? But life will keep going. In one direction or another. And what better way to live it than in full, uncertain, tragic and beautiful possibility.