What My Houseplants Taught Me About Getting Back To Normal

When getting back to normal feels anything but normal, we can learn a thing or two from our houseplants, and our children.

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I’ve never attempted to sprout a tree from a seed. As much as I love my plant houseplant menagerie, it’s a new experience to begin with the seed of an evergreen. It took a different sort of care. One that was not intuitive at all. I had to soak it at room temperature, and let it germinate in the fridge on a wet towel for a week or more. Doubt filled my mind as I pulled the crystalized paper towel out of the fridge to plant it in soil. But despite my reservations, the chute came up after only a few weeks of watering, waiting, and sunning.

There’s something deeply satisfying about growing something from a seed. Be it a human, a carrot, or an evergreen tree, the process by which life unfolds is something akin magic. Sure, we can explain how a living thing grows. But we still have yet to find the reason why, beyond the propagation of a species. And as logical as propagation is, the process feels more elegant, more profound.

I have another plant in my home. I think it’s a dieffenbachia. At one point it fell over, the stock bending at the dirt line. I was worried it would die after that, but here we are six months later and it continues to stand. It’s lost a few of it’s giant leaves, which alarmed me at first. But while it continues shedding older leaves, new shoots spring from the top of it’s thick stock, proving that life continues to endure even amid loss and trauma.

The concept of getting back to normal doesn’t allow for us to move forward in the ways that are necessary.

My children have always shown this way of growing. Five steps forward for every one step back. And as challenging as these regressions can feel, in hindsight they always make sense. It’s as if they’re returning to a more familiar way of existing while they acclimatize to the idea of their forward growth. Perhaps it’s like finding momentum on the monkey bars, swinging back and forth, before reaching out for that beam that seems so far out of reach. Inevitably, they reach that beam and continue on to the next in the same fashion.

It makes sense that after a year and a half of chaos and upheaval that they’d once again find themselves having to adjust their entire frame of reference to yet another “new normal.” We’re all working at getting or feet back under us, which has required many of us, adult or otherwise, to retreat to the more familiar.

Often my first reaction to my children’s regression is despair. It takes some time for my mind to catch up to the fact that these shifts in their development are signs of stress, and that the backpedaling is temporary. Like the dieffenbachia in my living room, they continue to grow up and out.

Getting back to normal means embracing the idea that growth and change have always been “normal.” We are re-awakening to this truth.

It’s worth noting just how far we’ve come, how vastly different the world looks from this place we now find ourselves, and how well we’ve fared. So if you’re someone who’s struggled to give yourself grace as we are asked to turn on our heels yet again, I would encourage you to make enough space in your life to accommodate the one step back for every five steps forward.

The world is still in crisis, regardless of our decision to return to more familiar routines. It will take time to reorient ourselves. But be comforted by the fact that, for better and worse, we’re familiar with this reorienting routine. Taking on the pace of a tortoise, allowing the hares to remember in their own time, that patience has gotten us this far, and will continue to carry us for as long as necessary.

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Before you go, I just wanted to say thanks for reading. If you’re passionate about living a meaningful life that you can appreciate right now, you might like some of the other things I’ve written about.

I write here, but I also write over on Medium with publications like Change Becomes You, Illuminations, Be You, and The Writing Cooperative. To get updates about all my articles, plus a few tidbits for inspiration and insight, subscribe to my newsletter Food For Thought below. A sneak peek at the newsletter can be found here.

Thanks so much for your support! ~ Anon

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