Gardening is therapy, people have long been saying. With the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic affecting the world, growing plants seems to offer several learnings…

Learning 1: Life Struggles

Some seeds germinate, some prove no longer viable. Some seedlings come up without problems, some with issues.

Sometimes, seeds germinate well, the seedlings start growing – and then there’s a disease that wipes many of them out.

It’s all part and parcel…

But, even with death the natural end point of a life, as long as an organism is alive, it will struggle to stay alive.

Learning 2: Take Care

Death may be the end point of just about any individual life, but there isn’t just the natural struggle to live.

There is also the influence of care.

To care about life, and to care for the living. The nihilism of existentialist “it all ends, so why care?” is no help to anyone, not even to a person thinking so themselves.

It’s a way of running away from reality, trying to avoid one’s emotional involvement. Life is not only about existence, though. Living also means caring.

Learning 3: It Matters

Yeah, yeah, in the great course of things, nothing much matters. In the course of a life, however, it all matters. At least, all that is an object of care.

You cannot control everything. Sh*t will happen; things will not go as planned.

That is all the more reason to do what you can, to grow and flower and try to bring some joy. (There is an obvious joke about spreading one’s seeds I want to acknowledge, but find just too easy to be badly interpreted. I don’t want to go there ;) )

Well, then. Let’s grow. Care for ourselves and others. Botanical and, all the more, human others.