If you want to know why plants grow better than people, you just need to look at one small thing.
A Green Thumb
My dad had a green thumb. He loved planting almost anything. Most of my childhood was filled with vegetables grown from his garden. Wherever my parents lived, you could almost guarantee there would be a garden on the property.
It wasn’t just vegetables either. My dad loved planting flowers and plants and various other greenery to landscape a yard. In fact, his pride and joy was a rose garden he created with between 20 to 30 rose bushes of various colors, patterns, and exotic origins.
He could make anything grow. He had no problem taking any kind of plant and finding the way to make it sprout and bloom. He definitely understood plants and he knew the secret of why plants grow better than people.
Making Flowers Bloom
The one thing my father knew about making plants grow is that it varies by plant. Some require shade, some require more water, some require special conditions.
If a plant wasn’t doing well, he knew that something wasn’t right. He knew that he would need to change the amount of water it was getting or the amount of sunlight it was receiving. He knew that there was constant weeding that needed to be performed and keeping pests under control was a must.
He saw the things that affected the flowers and plants he grew. He saw directly why plants grow better than people. It’s not because of how we treat the plants; it’s because of how we treat the people.
Why Plants Grow Better Than People
In all the time my dad worked with flowers and in his garden, he focused on changing a lot of things. If the soil wasn’t right, he changed the soil. If the the location wasn’t right, he moved the plant. If the water wasn’t right, he adjusted the flow.
Never once did he try to change the flower. He knew something fundamentally about each flower: if you want a flower to grow, you don’t change the flower, you change it’s environment.
A flower will grow on its own. It’s what it’s made to do. It will bloom without any adjustments to its DNA. It will do everything that a plant should do if only it’s given what it needs to grow.
Helping People Grow
People are the same way. How often do we look at someone who’s angry and expect them to stop when we don’t know what’s causing the anger? How often do we look at someone who’s struggling expecting them to bloom toward a sun that’s been blocked from them by something we don’t know about?
If we think about it, we know why plants grow better than people: because we help the plants get what they need to grow and we expect people to grow whether or not they have what they need.
What if we focused less on making people change and focused more on giving them the care and attention that is missing in their lives?
