How to Recognize When You’re Ready to Grow
And learning to embrace the discomfort that comes with change.
As much as I love having plants in my house, I don’t consider myself to have much of a green thumb. I’m that person who finds it hard to keep plants alive, even succulents which arguably require very little maintenance. Still, as a nature lover, I’m constantly striving to learn how to be a better plant mom because I love the energy it brings to my home.
So when one of my plant’s leaves recently began to droop, I immediately went into fix-it mode. First, I placed it on the window sill because I thought it needed more light, but that didn’t work. I thought perhaps this was because it was too cold from the winter temperatures, so I moved it to my kitchen counter where it could still receive a decent amount of light.
That still didn’t work.
I then got the idea that maybe I needed to give it more water. But as you can probably guess, this didn’t have any effect either. My plant looked utterly sad, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
Confused, I decided to take a step back to see what I was missing. Soon it dawned on me that it had been a while since I repotted the plant. Of course at this point I couldn’t know for certain that this was the issue. But sure enough, once I removed the plant from the pot, I could see that the roots were cramped and practically begging for more space. Luckily, I had a larger pot in my cabinet so I quickly transferred it and hoped this would do the trick.
In a matter of days, the leaves began rising again, and I couldn’t be more excited.
You might be asking yourself, “Why is she telling me this story?”
At different points in our lives, we may find ourselves relating to the plant in this anecdote. For some people, this may feel like being stuck in a rut or going through the motions of living life but not feeling alive. Others may not be able to pinpoint exactly what they feel but just know that something isn’t quite right.
These moments can signal for us that we may have outgrown our current circumstances and that we need to make a change in order to grow. There doesn’t need to be anything drastically wrong with where we are. It just may mean that what used to serve us no longer does, or at least not in the way we want it to.
Understandably, change can be a scary thing because there are many unknowns. And, we can learn to embrace the discomfort by seeing it as a nudge that we’re ready to expand.
For example, barring extenuating circumstances, few people leave their job because it’s everything they ever dreamed of. They usually leave because it’s gotten too uncomfortable to stay. This, in turn, opens the door for new possibilities to explore what might bring a greater sense of peace and fulfillment.
This is what life is at the end of the day–a lifelong journey of expansion. In this way, moments of discomfort invite opportunities to evolve if we can learn to not only hear the whispers but respond to it. This is not always easy to do, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be painful either. In fact, it can actually be enjoyable if we can learn to detach ourselves from what is or what ‘should’ be and instead be open to what could be.
Peace x Love,
Lina