Plant-Killer

Plant-Killer

 

I’ve been sitting at my desk this past month writing blog posts so wrapped up in blogs and autism and numbers of budgets and spreadsheets (my new special interest apparently) that I’ve neglected my poor little bamboo. Watered two or three times total, it wilted and died, like any plant does without water. I’ve killed dozens if not hundreds of plants by now. I can’t even keep cacti alive. They require so little water that by the time they actually need water, I’ve forgotten. I enjoy succulents a lot though. They remind me of myself: prickly but beautiful—you can enjoy from afar, but don’t get too close or it might hurt you, or you it.

I think I need a different plant to identify with. Some might suggest a very high-maintenance plant, and I wouldn’t take offense to it. I feel so high-maintenance without even meaning to be. I like bamboo. Something about how it comes neatly in sections, you might be able to slowly bend it to your will over time maybe, but it also reproduces like no tomorrow! I don’t know. “Lucky” “money” good words to describe a plant. Maybe that’s just marketing to dumb Americans.

It's not that I hate plants and buy something just to kill it over time, watching it suffer. I don’t forget about it, except I totally forget about it, because watering something once a week should not be that difficult, right????? So I am going to keep going to buy a bamboo plant until I can keep it alive. And the person I told called me a plant-killer. Here’s the thing though. I’m inspired. The reason the plant dies is because I don’t organize enough. The person I told challenged me to do research and see which was the hardiest of the bamboo plants and get that one first. Then work up to the most challenging to take care of. For him, it’s all about research. For me, it’s all about alarms, writing stuff down, and making sure I actually do the thing when the alarm goes off to do the thing! I’m a planner who gets distracted easily and has a dozen things going on in my mind at one time. I have to make sure it actually gets done. There is no auto-pilot.

That is one big thing I learned about myself recently. I used to think it was “auto-pilot” to over time have to put less energy into thinking about every specific thing that you do, but that’s not what that means… In the classroom, I may grasp concepts and act intelligently, but I have to think about each step of how to brush my teeth, take a shower, or do laundry… and I have missed steps before because I was thinking about something else and not about the knobs or the toothpaste v soap or the whatever. Yes, I have put soap on my toothbrush before because I wasn’t concentrating hard enough. And no, I won’t tell you what I age I was when I did it.

I am a plant-killer… until I am not. There are things we can change about ourselves if we try… and things we cannot. But we won’t know until we try to change. I don’t want to kill plants, and my husband doesn’t want to water plants in the house until he dies. So the only option is for me to change, and I WANT to change. This is a choice. We all have a choice every single day whether to stay who we are or to try to change, and I want to try to change for the better. Yes, sometimes it doesn’t always work out for the better, but I would rather try than to stay the same in fear of something bad happening if I try something different. Who’s to say staying unchanged isn’t something bad already?

I invite you to join the plant-killer—and let’s not kill plants together!