are people like plants?

When a flower gets enough sun, water and nutrients, it blooms. Plants that don't get what they need, don't bloom, don't thrive. The same is true for people.

So, if I'm not getting what I need, do I uproot myself (put myself in a little pot on wheels) and roll myself to a new location? Do I find a better spot that gets more sun, kinder, gentler rain, and has lovely rich dirt to sink my happy roots into?

What's missing from this analogy is that often the way a person's brain is wired interferes with them being able to absorb the necessary nutrients from their environment.

How would this work with a plant?

The closest analogy I can think of is that the soil in an arid region can become parched to the point where it no longer absorbs water:

After a long dry spell, the first heavy rain brings flash floods because the earth is unable to absorb all that water at once.

All that lovely water, that should be a life-giving source of sustenance, becomes a destructive force that rips through leaving devastation behind, washing away the precious, painfully accumulated topsoil that life depends on.

(Feeling like Shrek trying to explain himself to Donkey:




"Ogres are like onions. We have layers. D'ya get it?")

Okay, trying to weave all these loose threads into something resembling a coherent idea:

What if you're a human who has been in a long, long dry spell, to the point where your ability to absorb any praise whatsoever has become impaired? Where kind words are meaningless, and just roll off you like raindrops off the dusty hardpan of a desert riverbed?

Sometimes people come along and dump a bucket of water on you (metaphorically speaking) when they see you're dry (like a plant with brown leaves), or you've done the equivalent of 'turning brown' by telling somebody what you're feeling. And they walk away feeling virtuous and proud of having helped you, while you're standing there dripping wet and shivering, and your leaves are still brown. It's just that now they're brown and drenched.

The trouble is, a single dousing with water does not a healthy plant make.

A healthy plant needs lots of things, starting with a well-prepared garden bed (unless of course you're a weed - which is the subject for another post). The seed or start needs to be carefully planted, at the right depth, under the right conditions. It's true that a seed can be cast randomly and will sprout just fine; but will it take? Will it thrive in the long run? All these depend on what kind of soil/situation it landed in - is it overshadowed by taller, bigger trees that will steal its sunlight and rain?

Here I find I must switch over to the gardening metaphor, where the only way people get what they need is when other people tend to them, just the way a loving gardener tenderly cares for each individual plant in his yard.

Now it's true that not every gardener works this way; some gardeners subscribe to the 'tough love' approach, and dang if that doesn't work out just fine sometimes!

However, that's not the metaphor I'm using here, because I personally am a plant that has absolutely not benefitted from this approach. So-called 'benign neglect' has damn near killed me, in fact.

Some people take advantage of the fact that if you keep a plant from getting quite enough water and deprive it of certain nutrients, it'll bloom like heck because it thinks it's going to die, so it has to get on with the business of producing seeds as rapidly as possible to carry out its basic life purpose, which is to reproduce.

I've seen (and experienced) this method as applied to humans. Funnily enough, it may have the short-term effect of producing gorgeous blooms, just like the hothouse flowers; but long term? The plant dies. It's been deprived, brutally, of the kind of slow-growing, carefully nurtured root system that allows it to grow healthily, at its own speed, according to the conditions of the environment it's rooted in. A properly cared for perennial (which is what I aspire to be, namely something that comes back every year without actually taking over the yard) is gorgeous, a thing to behold, that becomes lusher and more beautiful with each passing season 'til it reaches its full, glorious maturity.

Well, I've wandered far afield, and still don't feel like I'm getting wherever it is I'm trying to go. Maybe part of the process is clearing the brush (deadwood, false starts?) so that you can see your way clearer.