Roots Up Against The Pot Wall

I confess that I am not the green-fingered gardener I would like to be. It’s all about patience, isn’t it? You plant things and you wait, and in the meantime the weeds which were not planted fill up the space.

I lived in Cyprus for a short while. I exchanged cloud, rain and badly behaved pupils in a London city school for warmth, sunshine and badly behaved pupils in a small private church school. I do the pupils an injustice by painting them all with the badly behaved brush. It’s just that they are the ones that stick out in the memory. There were plenty of well-behaved pupils in the mix.

I rented a flat a short walk from the school. It was a common thing for parents to add another layer to their home for the next generation to live in. There were always poles poking up from a flat roof ready for the next layer. By the time the next generation were ready to move, they did not want to move upwards from mum and dad. The flat was also dated by that time and did not have the open spaces and slick kitchen cabinets that they wanted, so they rented elsewhere, and the parents rented out upstairs to someone else.

There was no garden which is perhaps a good thing as me and gardening had yet to find common ground. I like playing with soil, sometimes. I like mowing grass, sometimes. But I lack a proper gardening gene, complete with green fingers.

I did have a balcony. And I filled that balcony with potted plants. The names of these plants escape me now, if I ever knew them. They might have been herbs come to think of it. They grew. Who doesn’t grow in plenty of sunshine? They were watered and they sat in the sunshine and they flourished. They outgrew their pots and I moved them on to bigger pots. The process came to an end when I could find no bigger pots and the landlord was concerned about the state of the balcony. It might not have been designed for big pots and the ‘triffids’ in them. Even now, I wonder why I did not break up the plants into smaller specimens. I just didn’t. I stopped growing plants, more precisely, I allowed them to die and cleaned out the pots and that was me done with pot plants. If plants have some kind of collective, inherited memory they think of those Cyprus days, uproot and make for anywhere I’m not.

I am challenged to think about those pot plant days. I am not a potted plant, but there are always comparisons to make. I think if I was, I’d be at the pot moving stage. I may have outgrown the pot I am in. I have been moved elsewhere on the balcony of life and I’m not sure I like the change. The angle of sunlight and shade is not the same as it was and there are new pots and new plants to rub shoulders with. Am I up to rubbing new shoulders and inhaling new fragrances.

I have come up against the pot wall. Being introduced to new experiences, and not all of them being nice experiences is challenging me. Living in ruts is not a good thing for anyone – not when the tractors use them and crush everything beneath a big black tyre. But I have habits, I suppose. Ways of thinking and ways of acting and sometimes it feels like these things are all up for grabs. The rug beneath my feet feels distinctly pulled. I want to adapt, but I want to hold on to what is familiar too.

University has forced me to learn new things and the old dog in me wants to lie down and sleep. I am not entirely sure I have been having fun with it, and that is perhaps why I struggled. I lost my sense of fun. But then, when are writing reports and research ever fun? But I intend to stick with it – I am halfway there in my creative writing degree.

I think growth is all about risk. We learn to walk by risking the fall. If we are not willing to risk the fall, we never walk. If we never walk, we never run, we never skip or jump and we never move form the place we are at. Thinking we can’t walk and being totally sure we can’t means we rarely try. Muscles that should be working don’t and new scenery that we should be seeing we don’t see. All because we don’t take the risk.

Perhaps what spurs us on to growth is seeing others around us grow. Perhaps our growth, or lack of it, is down to the people we hang around with. The things that people say or choose not to say can hinder how much of a growth mentality we can embrace. We are each other’s growth encouragers or inhibitors. I have been on the receiving end of so much encouragement. And it never stops. Not for me and the people I spend time with.

I am surrounded by people who speak a positive word. Their words are not my words. Sometimes I have to have a good look at my words, turn them over carefully, look for the rust if it is there and, maybe, replace my words with their better words. But only if they are better.

I’d like to think that we don’t stop growing, but I think we do. Maybe there is a time when we stop pushing out roots. We stop exploring the world. We like where we are and what we have and our roots never meet the edge of the plant pot. And, sadly, we conclude that embracing the new comes at too high a cost – we lose who we used to be and have too little confidence in who we are becoming.

I don’t want to stop growing.

To stop growing is to start dying.

Isn’t it?