INSPIRING THE HUMAN SPIRIT

 

I learned a lesson one day when I saw some weeds in my lawn and did something completely out of character for me;   I know that people who know me aren’t going to believe this, but I actually started pulling the weeds.  Now, if you expect that it will ever happen again, it won’t.

I started with the small weeds, knowing that I was probably going to have to have some sort of tool for the larger ones.  This was an impromptu defoliation after all, and I really didn’t want to dampen my enthusiasm by having to spend time wading through  my garage to find something to dig with.   The first weed I pulled produced just what I expected, a small weed and a small root that was easy to extract.  The second weed produced the same.  Don’t begin to worry about me at this point….I didn’t grow so attached to this experience that I numbered my weeds. It just happened.

Now we come to weed number three, and isn’t it just like anything worth the telling, it’s always weed number three that begins the important part of the story.   Weed number 3, although quite small, had a root that was at least two-feet long and required the use of a tool and quite a bit of muscle and leverage to pull that huge thing out of the ground. My finger nails werent  doing well. I had been taught as a child that if you leave any part of the root in the ground you might as well not pull the weed because it would begin growing again.   I pulled the entire weed. Root in tact. 

Weed number four convinced me that there was a lesson to be learned here as the rest of the afternoon became an adventure of surprises each time the root didn’t match the part that was showing above the ground. I was having a moment with what I was discovering. Sometimes the top would be small and the root would be long, and sometimes the top was very large but the root was short. 

I began to realize that these weeds were like some of my bad habits and choices; sometimes the part that shows looks small, but the roots go way down deep and are very hard to extract.  Sometimes the part that shows is big, and the root is small and easy to extract.   And come to think of it, sometimes the color of the weeds are exactly the same color as the grass that they’re growing in and blend in so perfectly I don’t even see the space they’re using up in my lawn until they’ve outlasted their welcome by turning ugly and brown.  Beyond that, sometimes weeds, just like our lifetime habits, simply “grow themselves to death” and die off because they lived too fast, but this is an unfortunate rarity.

Knowing about the nature of weeds is a pretty good way to deal with the bad habits of my life or areas I need to grow.   Now, I’m talking about the little habits that make the “lawn” of my life messy; habits like being habitually late, or spending more time on Facebook than I do looking into the faces of the people I love; habits like language I wish I didn’t use, or caring more about what people look like than what they are like; habits like being too lazy to take off my makeup before I go to bed, or not being able to ignore the text message that just came in.

 A lot of people feel that they have to know the “why” of a habit before they can forsake it, but to go back to our weed metaphor and getting to the root of it, I can say with certainty that I never once waited for the answer as to why weeds are in my lawn before I dealt with them!  They’re there because they just ARE, and will only go away if I pull them or treat them in some other way that gets rid of them, because there has never been a weed in history that got removed from a lawn through analyzing its origin or its come-from.  If I wait to find out why those weeds are there, the weeds will still be there next week, and next year, and next decade.  If I pull them, they won’t be. This is the part to pay attention to.

 It’s heartening for me to know that not all of the bad habits or baggage I want to get out of my life will require extra tools and extra digging to get them out, so I shouldn’t be afraid to start on them because they may be easier to extract than I think.   It’s inspiring to know that if I deal with my weeds now while they’re small, I won’t have to deal with them when they grow and sink two-foot roots.  To know that I can spend just a few minutes identifying the weeds, then go for their jugular root without any fanfare or time on an analyst’s couch.Personal growth is required. just a willingness to see what is deep down

That’s not to say that I won’t still have weeds with long and strong roots to deal with, but to continue our metaphor, to know that I can starve them to death by not nurturing them, and that I can refuse to give up on that root until I have it all extracted.  And since weeds, because it’s in their nature, produce seeds at the end of their lifetime, this gives me the caution that to not pull the “Mother Weed” means that I’ll have to deal with the sprouts at a later time.

Maybe today can be the day that calls you to examine the weeds in your own lawn.  Maybe some will be a struggle, and some will come right out.  Maybe some will be gone forever, and maybe some will come back every time it rains and you’ll have to do it again next year, but isn’t that what makes a lawn beautiful…the care that went into it?  Keep in mind, some weeds are just misplaced flowers. They are beautiful to look and  a possible disaster in disguise.

Don’t be afraid, just identify Weed # 1. Pull it out by the root. Notice how deep it goes and what it intertwines with in your life….and if you decide to name or number your weeds, it is okay with me.  I won’t judge.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.