The Joy of Watching Plants Grow
On a summer day, you decide to buy yourself a cherry tomato plant anticipating how many little tomatoes will be growing from this plant alone. When you get home, you carry the plant to the designated location. You use a deep pot to plant your newly bought tomato plant in. Then you immediately water it, I live in Colorado, and summers bring up storms almost like Florida.
Before the storms became daily, I would go outside to my back porch and water the plants. I would watch as the flower portion of the plant began to bloom open, Signaling the birth of these little tomatoes was coming. I was so grateful to see this progress in the first week. It was terrific, although it might not seem that great. Yeah, it looks like an everyday thing. It’s not; not everyone has the opportunity to go to the store and watch their plant grow. This is a blessing in itself.
It started with white flashes in the sky, and boom went the first sound of thunder. The sky was ready to cry; it became apparent very quickly as raindrops began to echo as it hit the cement and surrounding earth around it. It was dark, and earlier, it had been lighting out. That is the times of Colorado weather for you. The rain soon became hail. I was worried my plants wouldn’t make it with crazy weather like this. I didn’t want to lose the tomato plant I had been nurturing all this time. I trusted that things would be ok even with giant solid ice hitting each plant.
The next morning, I woke up to find my plant had survived the rough storm of the night. There was a hidden gift within the green bulbs layed a single red tomato ready to pick. The miracle was that through the rain, the tomatoes had stayed safe and grew anyway. No storm could stop them from growing.
That falls into everyday life; no one can stop you from growing or moving forward in life. I know when my day seems to be going to hell quickly, I always choose to see the light that never leaves my side. My tomato plant is an excellent example of growth, even in a storm.
I remember when I was a caregiver for the elderly, I had a client I loved. She was the sweetest, but in caregiving, like any job, there are good and bad days. I am going to call this Client L. She always had a specific way of shopping for her groceries, and if anything changed, it was jarring for her it was like the world turned upside down. I would always try to calm her when things changed and tell her it would be ok and we can relearn the store together. She would be upset for a while until she thoroughly let go and went towards her daily buys with a treat at the end. That was her storm that she always grew through.
When I drove to somewhere in Florida to Asteria, I drove a car rental with little gas but was willing at the time to take the risk. I had never stayed the night at a rave festival before. I was meeting a group that called themselves the wolf pack. I am thankful for them; I ended up in a tent with a stranger, but he was a beautiful one part of the wolf pack, and I was ill preprepared for camping in the cold night of Florida. I had a jacket, and that’s it, which I used as my blanket and brought a pillow. The earth was not comfy, but the music was the fire. I went to every part where there was music playing. I saw new Dj’s I had never heard of and met people who had the biggest hearts and just loved you for you. It was an incredible experience.
The next morning, early who I had been sharing a tent with woke me up to tell me he was leaving. I got up and packed what I had and walked straight to my car as the majority of people were sleeping. This time in my life was still a low point. I had enough cash barely for gas and food, but I was hungry, so I was willing to see if I would have enough.
When I got to the gas station with a total of 11 dollars and 12 cents, I grabbed a breakfast sandwich and coffee. My gas tank was almost done, and I needed it for the two-hour drive back to my house in clearwater that I was renting at the time. When I got to the register, I asked the associate to put seven dollars towards gas and said the gas tank number, and my total came to 12 dollars and 12 cents. I told him I didn’t have that much on me, and he said it is ok, I gotchu.
I was thankful since I was able to eat and drive entirely back to my house. He covered a dollar for me out of his pocket. I survived my storm thanks to a kind soul. The moral of the story is even through the darkest storms; we continue growing.
Even though the hardest of storms, we all still grow. We might get rained on, which to me, is the perfect opportunity to dance in the rain. We might get hit with hail, and the hail symbolizes hard times, those times are given to us to grow and become stronger from the experience. It doesn’t mean you should hide your feelings. It means you should embrace the feeling these hard times bring in life. On the other side of hard times, there is always an unexpected gift. There is always light waiting for you to see it, but the light can’t show itself to you. You have to see it for yourself in everyday life, whether its a random stranger holding the door open for you, A person saying hello as you social distance, Someone paying for your coffee in the morning, Your boss being understanding, and Someone covering gas for you. The light is everywhere, and in everyone, it never leaves.
