Root Systems

Growing up with a father as a landscaper, I've always been interested in the outdoors. I'm not the most amazing gardener ever, but I always loved helping my grandma in her year when I was younger. One of the first things I learned about gardening is that weeds will destroy anything you're trying to grow. In order to kill them, you have to pull them out by the roots. If you just take the tops off, they will grow right back the next time rain comes. Effectively taking the roots out will allow a healthy garden to grow and prolong the life of your plants.

This analogy may not be mind blowing, but when it comes to dealing with problems in life, I think we need to go about solving said problems in a similar way that I was taught to garden. Attacking problems in life at surface level is like sticking a band-aid in a cut that needs stitches. It may heal the wound for a moment, but it will leave a lasting scar. But finding the root of the problem will allow you to really deal with the issue at hand. And just like weeds, if you don't take care of something fully the first time, the minute a storm in life hits you, the problem grows even bigger because you never handled it all to begin with. This results in making it difficult to get through something that comes up. Sometimes trees and plants grow so close to each other that their root systems start to grow together. In the same way, sometimes one problem that you have may have began as the result of a previous problem. This is another reason why it's important to take problems out by the root. Otherwise, you may not even know where to look when you're trying to solve a problem. And when that storm hits, instead of only needing to pull one root system out, you don't even know where to begin.

A lot of us carry baggage with us from our childhood. I know I do. Things happened when I was a child that scarred me for a very long time. When I was younger, I never dealt with those problems. As I grew up and started to use drugs, the thought never occurred to me that I may have been using so heavily because I was masking out the pain I never dealt with. So when I tried to quit on my own, I never ended up succeeding. I always figured that in order to quit I had to just remove myself from the drug and try to steer clear of temptation. Where that was partially helpful, it wasn't effective because every time I began to feel down about life, I'd forget about trying to resist temptation and go right back to using. It was the only way I knew how to cope. Finally the time came that I knew I needed a better way to deal with life other than drugs. But because I had just been putting band-aids on my wounds for so long, I had no clue where to start. While I was in treatment for 6 months dealing with my depression and drug abuse, I started to learn about root systems. I was told that I needed to face the problems from my past and really deal with them. I had no clue that a lot of my trust issues and depression stemmed off of events of my past. I had just figured that I was young and this is normal. But as I began to dig deep and discover some things, I started to learn a lot about the root systems that had grown over the years within me. And when I started to pull the roots out, one by one the heavy burden I'd been carrying for so long started to be lifted off of me. It was crazy how dealing with one huge root made it easier to cut off smaller ones. And it was interesting to see that a lot of the struggles I was facing weren't that big of a deal once I started to deal with the real underlying issues.

Today, when struggles happen I try to think back to what I learned while being away for 6 months. I try to remember that just coping with a problem isn't going to help me in the long run, even if it appears to take care of the issue at first. It has slowly become easier to cope with life knowing that I've gained the tools I need. Life wasn't intended to be easy, but it wasn't intended to be hard all the time either. I've had times where I've made it more difficult than it needed to be because I wasn't able to deal with it the way I needed to and humble myself to ask for help. So as life continues to happen, I'm going to continue to go back to my gardening guidelines and remember that the first step to a healthy garden, and healthy life, is to pull up the weeds that begin to take over by the roots!