Wednesday, August 22, 2007

LESSONS FROM THE PINK POT

“Why am I like this?” the clients ask in counselling. “Why do I drive people away? Why don’t I have any friends? Why can’t I have a happy relationship?”

Sometimes I get a bit impatient with the whys. I’ll admit that wondering why can be interesting, even informative if it leads to an investigation, and I don’t dispute the fact that knowing the cause can point the way to the cure. But I think it is a shame the why’s are able to command so much attention.

How easy it is to give too much attention to the whys when you notice that one member of a group is different from the rest. I am reminded of this every morning when I walk down our front walk, passing between four identical ceramic flowerpots arranged symmetrically. All four were planted on the same warm spring day with equal numbers of colourful lobelia, gazania and marigold. Each pot was given one red geranium, though at that time the geranium was only a green leafy plant, not yet in bloom. All the pots were the same when we planted them, but now, in late August, the picture has changed. It was a good year for geraniums, and they have become the dominant feature. Three of the pots host dozens of red blossoms, and the fourth one—well the fourth one is festooned in light pink.

Why does that pink pot not match the others? Like any undeniable difference, the sight of the pink pot inspires the curious mind. You can almost hear the passers-by asking the question and giving themselves the answers, each as plausible as the others. Probably the people ran out of red geraniums and decided to plant the pots anyway. Or, maybe a red one died and was replaced with a pink. Or, you know, the lady who lives there is blind and likely cannot tell the difference.

Asking why can take you into territory that is interesting, but not always so useful. The answers you generate may not be the right ones. Our pink pot, we believe, is the fault of the greenhouse, but we don’t really know how the error was made. We went to a reputable greenhouse and bought a flat of eighteen red geraniums, not yet in bloom. Looking around our yard in August, we count seventeen red geraniums. The flat must have contained one pink. Perhaps a seed strayed out of another package, or a careless worker lost a label. Or maybe a red geranium can mutate somehow and transform itself to light pink, so light that a blind person with only the tiniest glimmer of vision can see the difference between it and the reds.

It is interesting to wonder about these things, but it gets a little tiresome if you don’t move on from there. In this we had a head start compared to the casual passers-by. The little pink blossoms were more easily spotted at a very close range. They were not very obvious in mid June, when the difference was discovered, and we wondered what we should do about it. At that point there were options. We could probably have made a transfer, substituted the pink with one of the reds from another location. But it didn’t seem important then. It was only a tiny pink geranium, hardly noticeable, doing no harm. Now in August, with the difference in the pots so great that it cannot be ignored, we no longer wonder whether to trade a pink plan for a red. With the well-established roots long and tangled, there is little value in wondering this. The option of making a safe transfer to create identical pots is no longer available.

Yet the pink pot still has lessons to teach me. I like to think of it as a morning reminder that we are not all the same, and everything doesn’t always turn out the way we plan it, and some differences just cannot be explained by asking why. These reminders serve me well on the way to the office, where people are forever asking me to explain the inexplicable, to give them reasons. Speculating on the reasons is an interesting place to begin, a possible starting point for finding a solution, but the time comes when I want to replace it with something else.

The pink pot has interested me more than any of the red ones. It helps me remember how much I like the different ones, and how quickly I get so accustomed to them that I hardly notice the difference at all. . The different ones are the most interesting, albeit sometimes the most frustrating. There is great satisfaction in helping them appreciate the difference, and build on it, and see what beauty can be found there.

The pink pot has also opened up a lot of room for questions about preference and pattern. Which of the four pots, we wonder, is our favourite? Where, we wonder, should we position the pink one? And then there is the question of the future. How, we wonder, shall we decide whether to plant red or pink next year?

Unlike the question why, which so often tricks us into thinking there is only one possible answer, our pink pot is a constant reminder that there are options. Options are the greatest gift that can be derived from being different. Having options can be a source of hope for anyone who is different, even those who did not choose to be different, even those whose differences cannot be erased by pursuit of knowledge about cause and effect.

All too soon the pink pot will be a thing of the past, no longer of interest to the casual passer-by. But I still have questions to consider. When I leave the office I will be preparing for winter, taking a geranium cutting to root before the frost. All winter the new plant will grow in the kitchen. With any luck it will flower in January, that darkest month when so many people are in need of hope. There is a choice to be made. Shall I take the cutting from the red plant or the pink plant?

I’ll have the pink, I think.

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