Stronger than we imagined

When one of my friends moved away, she gifted me a tiny plant in a pot. And knowing me, and my tendency to over water things, I've tried to be very careful. But what I've noticed in the last couple of months is that this little plant is growing sideways - its leaves stretching to the left in order to better reach the sun.

And honestly, maybe that’s just one giant metaphor for the way this world works. Sometimes we have to change our direction, grow a little sideways, be a little weird to find our way.

Sometimes we have to fall down to learn how to get back up again. Sometimes we have to lose what we’ve held dear in order to chase what’s of value. Sometimes we have to say goodbye because everything is impermanent, we ourselves are impermanent, and goodbyes are healthy sometimes.⠀
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Sometimes we have to face the difficulty, the heartbreak, the pain, the change, so that we know how beautiful the world can be, how beautiful the world still is.⠀
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Maybe sometimes we’re taught lessons we didn’t know we needed to learn. Maybe there’s a reason, or maybe there isn’t, but in time we’ll learn and grow regardless, and become strong. Stronger than we imagined.⠀
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I don’t have all the answers. And maybe that’s perfectly okay. Maybe I don’t want to grasp all the ins and outs of this crazy life. Maybe I just want to speak as much truth as I can from the things I’ve experienced. Maybe I want to inhale air and know that I’m blessed, we’re all so damn blessed.⠀
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Maybe I want to walk around and seek understanding from the world around me—from the trees, from the flowers, from the little sprout on my kitchen table turning his stems to the sun.⠀
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I wish things were easier. I wish it all so easily made sense. But it doesn’t, but it’s not. And I’m learning to accept this. I’m learning to accept we all have pain and that doesn’t make it okay, but it does mean we’re not in this alone.⠀
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And maybe we’ll fall and break and bend and change and get pruned by life’s circumstances sometimes. But maybe, just maybe, that’s where we grow.