Life & Therapy

Yesterday, I cut back two of my largest rosebushes for spring.  It always seems impossible that the roses can survive such pruning, but every year, they grow back even better than the year before.  I planted these roses when they were in one-gallon pots and each about a foot tall, and they’ve grown into massive climbers over the years.  Every spring,  I hack off an abundance of dead branches, cut back other branches that are partially dead, and leave just a few whole branches that are fully alive.  Every year the rose grows back, impossibly, up over the arbor and then busts out with a giant mass of flowers. The logic to cutting out the dead and dying parts is to allow the whole plant to focus all of its energy on the growing, living parts.  Doing so allows the rose to bloom more.  It is easy to underestimate just how much of the rose lives in its roots, hidden away from view.  We humans can learn from this.  Many times, we focus our energy on things that once bloomed like this rose bush, but that are now spent. We might need to cut them out of our lives, or we might need to trim something back a bit.  Maybe we spent years putting energy into a relationship that has reached its end, and it is time to cut this relationship out.  Maybe we are in the right career but the job we’ve focused our energy into has stopped taking us to the place we want to go in that career.  It is tempting to try to hold on to the dying parts, but doing so will keep the living parts from growing to their full potential.  Just because you put a lot of energy into something doesn’t mean you will be served by holding onto it.  If it has reached its end, there is nothing to be gained from trying to bring it back to life, and if you tie up your energy in the trying, you have very little energy left for the living and growing parts of your life. Knowing what to cut out completely, what to trim back somewhat, and what to leave to grow takes some observation, insight and time.  With a rose, you can tell a branch is completely dead because it is entirely brittle and brown.  These branches get hacked to the ground.  Other branches might be partially brittle and brown where they meet up with green.  These branches get cut at the first fully healthy part, right above a bud, so that the rose can focus fully on forming a new branch in the direction you want it to grow.  The branches that don’t get cut at all are the ones that are fully green from ground to end.  We can sort through the “branches” of our lives in the same way. Before you can even sort through the branches, you need to take your focus from the rose (or relationship, or project, or job) that once was, and put it on that which is in front of you right now.  Yes, this rose was huge last summer, full of flowers on all of these long branches that took so long to grow, but those flowers are not coming back.  Now you stand in front of a mess of branches in varying states of health.  There is no guarantee that this year the rose bushes will reach the level of magnificence they did the year before, but hanging onto the past will not bring that magnificence back.  There is no guarantee that a new relationship or a new job will feel just like the one you are leaving.  Guaranteed, however, is the fact that staying and trying to eke life out of something that is dead will feel much worse.  That first big cut feels like a leap of faith.  It gets easier, and by the time you finish cutting out the truly dead parts, you will feel a sense of relief and clarity.  Now you can focus on your living parts, and you will have the energy to take yourself to your full potential.                                                         

I have written a second post inspired by this one, about what happens when things end against our wishes, inspired by the thought of when pruning happens via the spring storm.

It is called: When Loss Hits Us Unprepared

Other posts like this: Emotional Protection Finding the Courage to Leave a Relationship Relationships and Shoes Emotional Decluttering