tldr
Life is like a garden in that you do need to tend it. As you live, you try to progress. Along the way, you meet people. You sow them into your lives, and then you weed as the garden grows. Determining the weeds is sometimes obvious. Other times, it is not.
There was a girl who used to live in the incredibly small “village”-style neighborhood that was within a walking distance from my house. We were on the same bus route and became friends as a result, two girls sitting next to each other on the bus on the first day of Kindergarden. We used to plan on running away together. “I’ll meet you at the gas station in the middle of the night,” we would say. Neither of us would actually go but we kept on acting as though we had. “I was waiting for you,” either of us would say. “No, I for you,” the other. It was a silly childish game that excited us: the prospect of packing bags, (one time I packed one with nothing in it but Smartfood popcorn ,clothes, a comic book, and all the money I had), excited us. She moved away when we were in the fourth grade or so and I never saw her again. In high school, she requested me on Facebook and we began to casually message each other, catching up. Upon further investigation, I discovered that this childhood friend was now a self-professed nymphomaniac compulsive liar addicted to drugs. I de-friended her on Facebook and she is no longer a part of my life. She was a weed. I tended to my garden.
I’m finding it more and more prudent as I’m growing that it really is necessary to surround yourself with only the best kind of people. If the people in your life do not inspire you to be your best, and do not allow and encourage you to grow, they have no business being in your life. They are weeds.
It may be a cynical view of humanity to think that we cannot all see past our relatively meager differences and help each other on a daily basis, but I have seen enough of it to know this is true. I believe that people can be good but be bad for you. Some seeds simply do not react well together. Hydrangea does not belong in the same garden as cactus flowers. They bloom in different conditions. They need different things. So do people change, and grow, and flourish at different stages, requiring the varied as the seasons change.
Life, in regards to the people with who you should surround yourself, is immediate. It simply moves too fast to consider for long who is negative and who is positive for you. It is a process which is often difficult and painful. Hearts bleed as hands cut by thorns. Not everyone has a Facebook page with a carefully out-lined personality: “nympho”, “liar”, “user”. It hurts determining weeds from good plants, but it is crucial, that once a weed is determined, your garden is mended. Tend to it. Grow.
People enter our lives in strange ways, and sometimes, the ways they leave them are even stranger. Such is life. Seeds travel through the winds and the waters. They end up in random gardens, some not in gardens at all. They grow, or they do not. Some become weeds, others blossoms. The sun burns. The earth turns. The gardener tends to his garden. I am simply naming things that happen.
Life is a garden, which to dig, you need only the best surrounding you. Dig it.
