Happiness Is Full of Cracks

I would never go so far as to consider myself a master gardener. But we do have some plants in the house. And most of them seem to be doing ok. Or perhaps the fact that we toss the dead ones is enough to explain why most of the plants in our house are mostly green.

In any case, one of the annoying challenges I face as a pseudo-budding gardener is that all these plants keep growing: Instead of “staying put”, they get big, they hit the ceiling, they encroach on the territory of others, and they fall over if I don’t either prop them up or split them into smaller pieces - which in turn grow.

It seems to me that life offers us the illusion that everything can be ok, and we can just coast with whatever we have, and be happy. Everything will just stay the same, and be good. Our fairy tales burn it into us with their fanciful “happily ever after” technique. But of course, we all know this is not the way life really works.

Life is a moving thing. Life wants to grow. It wants to change. It wants us to explore, to discover, to heal, to fix, to celebrate, and to be happy. And happiness is not a static thing: It always grows. It mends the wounded, and it breaks through barriers.

Complacency is a myth.

Even the deepest peace - moves.

We can settle for the way things are, and coast, and just get by. And Year Fifty can look more-or-less like day one. But we have a term for that, too: We call it boring. And we are made for more than that.

We are made to grow, to learn, to soar, to fly, to crack and to piece it back together again and then to go even higher than before. This is what life is really like, and this is who we really are.

So don’t stay attached to your containers.