Love and compassion and understanding and empathy and hope and so many of our best selves are living things that need nurturing. These universal healers are very much like potted plants. If they are not tended to they will die. Right view, right speech, and right livelihood grow these precious gifts. When they get big enough they need to be shared, having grown too big for their pots. Small clippings are freely given to others for them to enjoy! The original plant is now able to regrow, stronger, healthier, and fuller. Your friend now has a great new companion to feed and water, growing compassion and understanding for all in their world.
Some places and times seem to have an abundance of these thriving life forces while others devolve into deserts. When the “love plant” starts to grow too big for its pot it has to be shared or it will die. We cannot hoard our love and compassion; we need to share it to keep it healthy. It takes confidence sometimes to share our gifts when it seems they are foreign to our surroundings or our time. It is more difficult to share love and compassion when it seems we are surrounded by hatred and intolerance. Even the greatest gardens of life can decay if not tended. Warm sunny friendly places can become dark unwelcoming ones if not enough sharing occurs.
As with many things, there is not equal symmetry in how things grow and how they decay. It can seem that the forces behind decay are much stronger, even permanent. This is not the case. Decay cannot “spread”. Decay and death and hatred are simple and powerful, but love and compassion and growth are complex and subtle. Things have to have the right amount of light and food and water and gases and micronutrients and all kinds of stuff, maybe even magic and serendipity, to grow. On the other hand, give too much OR too little of any of these and growth is impossible. Too much food, too much water, is just as dangerous as too little of either. When all the variables are in a “good-enough” range growth occurs and even flourishes. But, as soon as any one of them is not in an acceptable range death begins. This makes death and despair seem so powerful, and almost permanent. They are not, they are simple. A single bad teacher surround by a bunch of good-enough teachers, for example, has been shown to have a larger impact on a child’s eventual life trajectory than a whole bunch of above average teachers devoid of that single bad one.
It is not about perfection. Thank God, as perfection does not exist. It is about good-enough. Good enough light and soil and gases and teachers and we can grow the all the love and compassion and understanding that not only we need but that the whole world needs. To borrow from the world of investing, love takes the escalator (slow and steady) whereas hatred takes the elevator (fast and sudden). As long as there is a single bud of compassion somewhere in the world we can reforest the whole planet!
