Life & Therapy

I recently switched my composting to a tumbler, from an open pile.  The old open pile is mostly decayed, and pretty tall.  In the fall, we couldn’t keep up with the volume of potatoes we’d gotten from our farm share, so some of them got tossed and left for dead. Or so we thought.  Recently, I noticed that there is a large potato patch growing in the old pile.  I’ve decided to let these potatoes grow, and see what sort of harvest will appear later this summer.  These plants certainly will get quite a nutrient-rich diet in their very tall bed of organic matter.

The abandoned potatoes are like some of the “mistakes” we make in life, that we may judge as wastes of time and energy.  Some of our most fertile lessons come from making mistakes.  We all have an internal composter, whether we know it or not. When we do something that we wish we hadn’t, there is no point in trying to go back in time to rewrite our history. Spending too much time in remorse and self-recrimination is not productive, either- it is similar to hoping that compost will decay in a landfill. Instead, we can acknowledge and understand our mistake, then allow that understanding to break down the shame we might have.  When we allow the mistake to “decompose” in ourselves, wisdom will grow from the decay.