Unless you are a rose in the arctic…
March 2024
Our desire for one liners that can support YOU to fix everything and change your life NOW is vast and never-ending. This month I’m digging into a few I see the most. I want to show that 1) yes,they can be supportive (at times) but they can also 2) do serious damage and harm when used incorrectly.
Bloom where you are planted.
The visual on this statement makes it instantly understandable and recognizable.
We can see and understand the limitations and rules of nature surrounding us. No study or internet research needed.
Plants are usually permanently wherever they are. They can’t just get up and move to a different location. Nor would they want to. They are in that certain location for survival. If there is a dry year or an overwhelmingly wet year, they find ways to cope and survive, blooming and flourishing when the situation is balanced again.
Even house plants come in a pot. They can’t ask for a new container, a different window of light, more or less water. So they do their best where they are.
Plants can give signals but it is up to some other force – humans or Mother Nature to make the big changes.
There are lots of positive things in “Bloom where you are planted.” We can do hard things, we can withstand challenges and tribulations and still thrive, we can listen to and wait for what Nature (or the Still Small Voice 😉 ) wants us to do next, rather than running to the next pot or field, and (our least favorite in this society) things take TIME.
Blooming isn’t an instant occurrence. It requires patience, nourishment, and time. These are all great lessons.
However, there are situations in which all the patience, nourishment and time will not cause a bloom and may even cause deterioration and disease. As humans, we have purposefully (and accidentally) moved plants and animals to habitats that are not their natural home. Sometimes they adapt and thrive. Sometimes they don’t.
Sounds a lot like humans.
The difficulty is, as humans, we have lots of differing stories about where our home (physically, emotionally, spiritually etc) is located and how we are to get there. We all feel the call to bloom and thrive yet we may find ourselves in a land that year after year is full of drought, pestilence and disease.
Unlike plants, we can pick up and walk elsewhere. And sometimes, that is EXACTLY what we need to do.
Stop trying to bloom where you are planted and go find a nourishing, supportive place. You are not stuck in a pot. Thankfully. Though I easily forget this myself.
When I’ve felt the feeling to pick up and walk somewhere else (removing myself from a situation or quitting something), there has been the added pressure of watching everyone else around you “seemingly” bloom. So I ask myself the questions: What is wrong with me that I’m not happy in this situation? Why am I unhappy? Why does this work for everyone else but not me? (The fact that we all now have to put “our best face forward” at all times with how pervasive everyone is in our lives is not making this better for anyone. Yes, I’m calling you out social media!)
I’ve also had people who fed me this line (or versions of it). While it was meant as support to help me get through difficult times there were times it felt like they were wishing me a miserable death sentence – they wanted me to keep being in pain? It was also used as a line of blame. It really meant “Suck it up and deal.” It was meant to get ME in line, for me to not rock the boat, for me to not leave.
There are many times that I spent years (decades) trying to bloom where I was planted. And I was hell-bent on doing it, even at a severe cost to my body and health. I can Pollyanna with the best of them. I can cover and paint that pile of junk with the most creative things.
Instead of “blooming” though, I learned how to take more crap and integrate it into my life. It was not fertilizer. It was a parasite sucking what little life I had left out of me.
There is wisdom in “Bloom where you are planted.” If there is patience, time and nourishment, this might be the exact thing I need at the time. However, if after patience, time and nourishment there is nothing…luckily you are not a plant. You can pick up and move on.
That can look like many things. I worked on “moving on” for many years until I physically could move on. There are things that I’ve been working on “moving on from” for decades. It can be a challenge to move from one pot to another, one climate or situation to another.
The difference is you put the energy and time into moving on instead of staying where you are.
I wonder how many people who look like “they bloomed where they were planted” were focusing on moving out of the situation it looked like they bloomed in. We will likely never know.
(Let’s not even get into the “Well, maybe they wouldn’t have moved on if it wasn’t that situation. So they needed that situation to really bloom.” I wouldn’t take anything back in my life and YET, there are millions of ways to get a human to flourish that doesn’t require the immense suffering and pain that one goes through. Just because it happened that way DOES NOT mean that it had to. Not everything has to be a growth redemption story. I worry with all this spinning of bad things, we are more accepting of them. Just because it happened doesn’t mean it was NECESSARY to happen and it doesn’t have to happen again. Another rabbit trail for another time.)
So my additions to “Bloom where you are planted”:
“They decided to move on and right as they moved on, they looked beautiful and radiant, so we decided they bloomed where they were planted.”
“They took something awful and still bloomed, yet that doesn’t mean that any or all of the suffering and pain was necessary.”
I refuse to deny real life. Real life is messy and complicated. It is not something to be “solved” by a one line platitude.