Your Courageous Life

One of the hallmarks of the inner critic is “all or nothing” thinking: If it’s not all happening right now, it’s not working. If you change an old habit three times and then “mess it up” the fourth, it’s not working. If a bad habit didn’t stop the first time you tried, it’s not working.

I also think of this kind of thinking as “I don’t want to water the plant” syndrome.

When we buy a houseplant, we take it home. We fully expect that to keep it alive, we’ll need to, you know, water it. Routinely. On a schedule. And we don’t stand around looking at the plant going, “Why aren’t you growing faster?” We also don’t tap our foot and say, “I watered you last week. Why aren’t you staying fully vibrant and alive without watering, this week?”

So, yeah–people? And especially people changing habits? They need regular watering. And sometimes plant food. And the right amount of light and heat. The occasional stirring of the soil. And sometimes? A total overhaul–a new pot altogether.

And okay, the metaphor is not exactly deep so much as it is obvious, but it’s fitting. Because when was the last time you knew of someone who said they were going to make some kind of change and then they started and then somehow, it didn’t quite reach completion? And did you hear them say things like or take on an attitude of, “I’m a defeated failure/loser/flake who can’t stick to anything”?

Have any of those people you “know of” lately been…you?

I notice myself wanting to do this all of the time with meditation, with slowing down. When I have a lot that I want to do, the old habit is to try and dive in and do too much at once. I’ll think of self-care, of slowing down, but then I won’t want to step into taking the time to slow down because I have an attachment to getting that to-do list done. In those moments, it’s easy to think, “Well, I took time to stop and breathe, to take it slow, yesterday,” as if having done it yesterday means that it doesn’t need to be done, today.

In those moments, I conveniently don’t want to “water my plant” so to speak. I want to treat self-care like this one-stop-shop that I just pop into now and again.

Sorry, friends. It doesn’t work that way.

Now, I mention that the impulse to avoid “watering my plant” is there, and most of the officious self-help articles I’ve seen focus their time on getting people to stop having any impulses not to water their plants. “Here are 10 easy steps to always want to water your plants!” says one article. “Need motivation to water your plants? Here it is!” says another.

These articles often strike me as babying, almost coddling. Helpful perhaps with tweaking some details, yet not always so helpful in the long run, because there’s an element of doing the “Look! Look at the airplane!” to them. I don’t need to be tricked into wanting to water my plants or to get motivated to water my plants.

I just need to have the simple reckoning that if I don’t water my plants, they get sick, and then they die. Then I gotta get a whole new plant.

It’s that adult, and that simple.

Like plants, each project or new habit also has its own watering schedule. It takes time, sometimes, to learn what that is. For instance, I recently started Bikram yoga. When I first began, I needed to “water my plant” by going every day. I knew that if I didn’t go every day at the beginning, I’d be more liable to quit. Someone else might know that for them, every day would be too much and a recipe for quitting. It’s all a highly individual thing, this watering schedule business, and it is learned over time. When I got sick last week, I took some time off. Again, learning from the past–learning from times when I had been sick but “pushed through” and observing how that hadn’t worked for me. When I was in college, my first plant ever was a little cactus perched on my dorm room windowsill. I watered it like crazy and it died. I had made the classic mistake of confusing lots of water with lots of LOVE. Nope. Dedication and determination are highly individual. I needed to adjust the watering schedule to the task at hand.

Also, it is helpful if I do not make watering my plants my new life or death Story. Sometimes we miss a watering. Sometimes we miss so many days or weeks that the plant…dies. Then it’s time to head back to the nursery and get a new one (because plants are good to have around, you know? one wouldn’t want to give up on them altogether). I try to catch all of my underwatered, under cared-for plants in their sick and ill stage so that I can try to shore up their health before they hit the dead and wilted stage. When I am not able to salvage anything, and death happens, I think a little healthy grieving could be in order (“Leafy was such a gooood little guy!”) but not too much.

And to carry this metaphor just one inch farther, I’ll share that I do not think it’s good to keep the old, dead, wilted remains of a plant laying around. This becomes a Graveyard of Failure, and who needs it? Sometimes I can tell that people are keeping these things around (sometimes I discover one or two of my own old dead things in a corner), and it doesn’t serve anyone.

Plants work with what they got. It’s this time, this soil, this plant life. We start again and again with the moment that we have, the resources that we have, the lives that we have. We can choose to water, or not water, our projects and undertakings.

Have you ever noticed yourself being “watering-avoidant” with the changes or projects in your life? What do you do to reinvigorate yourself? How well would you say you do with letting go of the “dead plants” of life?

P.S. Registration for The Courageous Year continues...Woot woot! Lots of plant watering goodness going on in there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 6:00 am |