Roots, Pt. 2

I killed a cactus this week. I didn't really anticipate that I would manage to pull that off, but I did. It was a small, colorful succulent cactus that I have potted in our dining room. It was a little bit strange to plant - I'm new to cacti and succulents - and I didn't have a lot of confidence in its future when I potted it, but weeks passed and it seemed to be okay. I watered it, it stayed colorful. And then all of a sudden, it was brown and shriveled and my toddler was pointing her finger at it asking me what was wrong with the cactus. It's officially the end of that cactus, but I still have a house full of other plants that are doing just fine. And as sappy as that metaphor is, I'm going to go ahead and expand on it anyway. 

I wrote back in January about how the word I chose for 2018 is roots. Now that we've bought a home again and are in a new town for the foreseeable future, I want to be intentional this year about putting down roots: making friends, getting involved with our church, participating in community activities, exploring the surrounding landscape, pursuing new opportunities to reach out and get connected. Even though this might seem like an obvious thing to do if you've just moved to a new place, it's not necessarily how the Moores historically have rolled. We didn't know our neighbors as newlyweds and if there were any community events, they were not on our radar. When we moved to Berryville, Virginia as slightly more established newlyweds, it took us a full year to find a church we liked, and another two and a half years before we made the kind of friendships that make us cry when we think about them now. We met people and I did make a lot of friends in the community before then, but it honestly felt like we were JUST getting our Berryville groove going when it was time to go. I regret that so much now. 

So I've been on the hunt for ways to put down roots in these last couple months. While I really bashed all of your heads in with the #adventure thing in 2017, I've been a little bit more quiet about #roots now in 2018, and it's mostly because putting down roots just looks really different. Adventures are fun and exciting and easily photographed; putting down roots is quiet and persistent work that takes time. You don't really and truly put down roots in a one-and-done, cross it off the list, singular moment. It takes time. It takes effort. It sometimes takes some trial and error while you figure out which friendships are the good ones, which events are the future traditions, which groups are the ones worth committing to. 

Putting down roots takes patience. 

And sometimes, roots don't survive. 

Sometimes you go to the store and you spend a few dollars on a new houseplant and a few more dollars on a cute pot for it, and you take them home. You carefully put some potting soil in the bottom of the pot and then you remove the houseplant from its temporary plastic pot and shake up the roots a little bit. You marry the roots and old potting soil with the new potting soil and you loosen it all up and maybe add some more potting soil on top for good measure. You water it and put it near a window and you watch it grow. Chances are, it will do well. Sometimes plants die because there are a lot of variables (too much water, too little water, too much sun, not enough sun, not enough soil, too much toddler interference, etc.) and we expect that to be the case. But sometimes plants just die because they're fickle little living things who don't respond to your care. You do what you need to do, you try your hardest, but the plant just doesn't live. Sometimes, the roots just don't survive. 

And sometimes...we get an idea that we are really excited about. Like a way to reach out to our community or make new friends or sell something we've made with our own two hands. And we think everything through and we work really hard and we do everything right, and it just doesn't work out. No one shows up. Or personalities don't click. Or no one buys your thing.

It can be incredibly, infuriatingly frustrating when the roots don't survive. 

But, I'm learning, it can also be incredibly, infuriatingly stretching. 

I've tried a couple of things this year already to try to put down roots, and they haven't really worked like I'd anticipated. (I'm sure that's super shocking to you at this point in the blog post. You probably had no idea that that's where I was going with this whole roots metaphor.) It's been hard to see things that I've worked hard on and really thought through and envisioned being successful falling flat instead. Last week I had a day where I took it all incredibly hard and could not get past the narrative that I was a complete failure because these things haven't been as easy or successful as I'd hoped. But the thing is...if one of my potted plants dies, I don't call myself a failure. I buy a new plant and move on. And maybe that's an okay mentality to have with the roots we try putting down in our lives too. 

Not every great idea is going to work out. There are going to be ideas that fall so flat they're not even worth trying to resurrect, and there are going to be ideas that make us reevaluate so we can try again from a different angle. 

The point, I think, is to keep trying.