I hope you’ll forgive me.

I am typing with a bum finger today.

So please excuse the typos!

You may be wondering how I earned my injury.

I was doing battle with a patch of unwelcome ivy in the backyard and ended up scraping a knuckle on the concrete.

Nothing serious.

But it got me thinking about today’s post.

It got me thinking about the weeds I’ve been watering.

And I wanted to see if you’ve been watering some weeds, too.

From growth to growths

Growth.  It’s a nice, hopeful image.  I think of change and pretty green things aiming for sun.

But when does growth become growths?

You know, those things that crop up unexpectedly in your life, uninvited?

That’s the stuff I want to write about today.

The growths.

The weeds.

The unwelcome stuff that shows up and steals all your time and energy.

If you have some bad habits you need to shake, a relationship that could use some pruning, or some unwelcome obligations that have your time in a tangle, read on.

Garden lessons

Don’t water your weeds.  Your time and energy are precious things.  Are you saving those resources for things that are deserving, or is it getting wasted on your weeds?

Some examples of weed watering might include:

+ ruminating endlessly about troubling past or future events

+ keeping a relationship that’s a drain on your resources

+ staying in a dead-end job months or years after you’re ready to move on

Or, you may have a clogged mental filter that, like a leak in a hose, wastes precious resources.

Roots reach deep.  Some pretty tough roots got the best of me today.

During my digging, I found that some weeds that appeared tiny at first had surprisingly thick roots.

Turns out I had been content with merely trimming things back for good cosmetic effect in the garden last year.

In the end, this cost me a lot of work.  Those roots, sleeping deep in the soil, had matured over many seasons.  They were much harder to unearth.

Trimming things at the surface doesn’t change all that much.  Roots for bad habits and unhappy relationships can run surprisingly deep.

It’s probably better to make a smaller change that you can sustain over time, than to try to overhaul everything at once.

Weeds might look fine, until they start killing the things you love.

Some things escape notice until you have a moment to pause and notice the damage they’ve already done.

I thought some of the ivy in the backyard added a nice bit of ground cover and a pleasant leafy green to the scene…

…until I found it strangling a young tree.

Some things have a way of taking over if left unchecked.

If you find that you can’t cordon off a relationship or habit—if it keeps creeping over into other things and mucking about—then maybe it is time to take some control back.

Take stock of things now.

Wonder if you’ll regret letting a relationship or habit grow unchecked three months or three years from now.

Stuff that worked last season might not work now. 

Part of my backyard experiment had to do with revitalizing old beds.

I ended up removing a rosemary bush that hadn’t fared well over the summer.

It was technically still alive, but I wanted to reclaim the space for something new.

The fact is that our habits and relationships mirror our state of life.

So as our lifestyles change, our needs will change.

What we need in a friend may look different now than it did five years ago.  An old habit may have served its usefulness and is now becoming a hindrance.  A job that was designed to serve as a stepping stone elsewhere may have now become a dead end.

Let yourself free up some space and time in your life for the things that matter.

Don’t be afraid to set old things aside.  They served you well for a time, but perhaps now it is time for something new.

Sometimes it’s just about timing and placement.

I dug up a few baby trees today.

I felt badly about it.

A part of me felt it was unfair to just make the decision to get rid of some perfectly good trees.

But as a friend pointed out to me, “Do you really want that there?”

What an excellent question.

Sometimes we look at things in our life and say, “Well, there’s nothing really wrong with that relationship/habit/goal/job.”  So it stays and continues to sap our resources, even if we aren’t getting much out of it.

Think about it differently.

Say instead to yourself, “Do I really want that there?”  This way, you raise your standards a bit.  Because sometimes it’s just a matter of timing or placement.

Maybe it had the makings of a great relationship, but the timing was all wrong.  Or maybe it was just a bit too far away.  Sometimes things just root in the wrong place, and we have to start over, try again.

Weeds are in the eye of the beholder.

(sort of)

One person’s weeds are another person’s daisies and dandelions.

Some weeds can offer unexpected beauty or benefits.

At that time, they cease to be weeds because they have a beneficial function or purpose.

But don’t forget that some weeds are weeds, no matter who is looking at them.

Don’t mistake a weed for a flower just because it makes you feel good.

Some relationships or habits are just plain problematic.

And naming it something else doesn’t change its nature.

So don’t let someone else do your weeding for you.

It’s up to you to comb through your life and see what stays and what goes.

Honoring the old.

There’s a quote I love, “Never cut a tree down in the winter time.”

In other words, don’t be too hasty to rehabilitate a relationship or job.

Yes, if you’ve been sitting with the decision for quite a while and nothing has come up to change your mind, it’s probably time to let it go.

But if you let things lie fallow for a bit, you may be pleasantly surprised with what comes up next season.

Sometimes a bit of time is needed for something to mature or change its shape into something useful.

Tending to your life

One of the most difficult decisions we must make in our life is this:  what stays, what goes?

We make this decision over and over again, sometimes without even realizing it.

And sometimes we have no choice in the matter.

But when we do, it is best to meet that responsibility head on.

We must be gentle curators or our own lives.

Because if we don’t do this important work, who will?

If you need help sorting out the weeds from the flowers, let me know.  I would be happy to help.