JUST LIKE JULIA

For the past two weeks, I have been nurturing an avocado pit, attempting to grow a plant as part of my ‘less waste, more sustainability’ lifestyle after moving to southern California. So far, the pit has cracked but no sign of a stem.

Yesterday, too busy to deal with dishes and the mess in the kitchen (as there were more fun things to tend to), I chucked another avocado pit into a bowl in the sink and thought nothing of it.

To my surprise, as I finally got to the dishes in the sink this morning, I pulled out the avocado pit, still with chunks of flesh on it and its skin intact, and found that not only had the pit split but a generous 1.5 inch stem had started to grow out of it.

I couldn’t help but laugh at the incredulity of the situation. While I had a general intention for the pit, I didn’t care about it at all and ended up having a viable root grow in less than a day while my other pit, nurtured and fussed over, failed to make as much progress as this neglected pit in the sink.

I love when life reveals some of its magical lessons and truths to me in the strangest of moments. Maybe especially when the timing is perfect.

My mentor had once mentioned to me, “No trying…ever”. I thought I knew what she meant but until this avocado pit incident, I didn’t really ‘get’ what she was trying to say.

Sometimes when you do all of that efforting, that trying, that wanting and pushing for something…you find that your efforts yield very little results and at a slower pace. Perhaps this is what they mean by resistance.

But when I didn’t try at all, didn’t even think about it, didn’t remember it until later, was I able to see tremendous growth. I think about all of the moments in my life when I have desperately wanted something, worked really hard for it just for it to fall flat.

I don’t want to say that my upbringing is to blame but I do want to say that my early environment and surroundings influenced this to be a subconscious belief. That you need to work hard, really try, really effort for something to be worthwhile. For something to work out.

And while these two avo pits had vastly different journeys and outcomes, I can’t help but feel a sense of gratitude for this lesson being learned so early in my life. That I don’t have to struggle for something. That just my natural intention and belief in something will generate the result that I want. It makes me think about all of the areas of my life that I find I am putting resistance into.

What parts of my story am I trying way too hard in to make something happen? What if I let go, surrendered and trusted? It makes me think: in what spaces of my life can I reel back in my energy and effort and focus on relaxing more into it?

It leads me into another segment of thought that I allow myself to meditate on subconsciously. Am I having fun doing whatever I am doing? Am I enjoying it? At what point of a task am I pushing myself through instead of just stopping and say to myself, “hey…I’m not having fun anymore. I’m giving myself permission to stop doing this and do something else”.

And it doesn’t mean I sit back like a potato and twiddle my thumbs. There must be some sort of action: a version of seed planting. But then you sit back, do something else, forget about it for a little while and you might be pleasantly surprised at what happens.