Life & Therapy

When planting a garden, it is tempting to put in full-sized plants so that your garden is completely filled in as soon as you are done planting.  The problem with this is that very soon, your garden will be overcrowded, and you’ll need to divide and thin many of your plants.  Dividing is hard work, and some plants don’t take too well to being disturbed and transplanted, especially when the root system hasn’t fully been established.  If your garden gets overcrowded too soon, dividing will interrupt the plants’ rooting process, which can take years.  Your plants may appear fully mature on the surface, but underneath the soil, they are still trying to develop their roots.  At this point, the shock to your plants will be great when you divide and thin them.  If you choose not to divide them, the more vigorous plants will choke out the slower-growing ones, undoing much of your original planting.

A gentler approach is to start with smaller plants or seeds, and give them the space and time to grow in and develop. The garden may seem a bit bare for the first year or two, and you may feel unsatisfied or jealous when you compare your garden to others that are fully established.  Given time, your garden will eventually grow to become fully mature and resilient.  When it is time to divide and move your plants around, their roots will be strong enough to handle the shock of change.

It can be tempting to rush a relationship in the same way, especially if we are surrounded by others who are in long-term established relationships.  We may meet someone and want to get serious right away without allowing the roots of the relationship to grow and mature.  It is easy to be impatient with the establishment stage when strong feelings are involved.  Maybe we jump into physical intimacy before we’ve developed trust and emotional intimacy.  We might move in together very quickly, commit to life partnership too soon, or have children right away.  These actions aren’t necessarily fatal to the relationship, but if taken too soon, will complicate things later on.  We may have to backpedal and change certain things: try to get our emotional connection to catch up with the physical one, try to set boundaries with each other after having none, or try to grow intimacy and trust with each other while immersed in the chaos of raising a child.  As with the plants, the shock of these changes is greater when, beneath the surface, our roots are still not fully established in the garden of the relationship.  Growth happens over time in both the garden and in love, so there is no need to rush past the rooting stage of either.