Breathing Room to Start Over

My best friend gave me some plants. “Just experiment,” she told me.

I’ve said it before. Me and plants…well, we haven’t found a good rhythm yet. I tend to kill them. Not on purpose…just out of ignorance. I managed to grow some herbs and spinach from seeds, but I couldn’t get them to the next stage. Now I have lettuce, kale, more herbs, a pepper plant, a tomato plant, a baby calamansi tree, and a jujube tree root. I really want to do my friend proud.

So when I water, I’m always begging the plants, “Please grow. Please be okay.”

I’m only beginning to wrap my head around the idea of starting over when plants die. They’re living things and I’ve always felt bad when I couldn’t take care of them. When I got so busy, they died. When I didn’t transplant them in time to give them room to grow and bear fruit.

So when my friend told me that’s it’s okay if I mess up, to try again, to start over, it was like a breathing room. She gave me some seeds from her own plants, so I’m waiting for this second generation to grow. I’m part of a cycle where seeds grow, plants fruit, die, and provide more seeds to grow.

Breathing room.

It reminds me that when I mess up with life, there’s room to start over. It’s okay to try again. Or when things end, it doesn’t mean I’ve failed. It doesn’t mean I’ve been wrong all this time. It just means the end of a season, a phase, a chapter. They end to make room for something new to grow, to begin, to unfold.

And that’s beautiful. It’s comforting to know that life goes on. We go on. Whatever terrible we’re facing today won’t last. Healing might take a while. Finding the light may take more strength than we imagined. Gathering courage might require some outside help. But the terrible won’t last. The end will make way for a new beginning.