There’s a chapter in my book titled “The Fairy Garden, Tending the Weeds.” I wrote about how surprised I was that the unattended garden had become overgrown with weeds, and the importance of tending to weeds both literally and figuratively, in our lives.
This thought came to me as I am—once again—tending to the fairy garden. The rocks and blue stones I carefully laid out last year, are sprinkled with weeds where I didn’t quite get the newspaper packed. The green sand was still beautiful until the roots of the grass I was pulling erupted spewing brown dirt through the once green patch.
I could have been upset, but I wasn’t. I could have felt defeated, but I didn’t. Although putting a newspaper base was an ecological good choice, it wasn’t for something like this. A better choice would be to use that black landscaping weed barrier.
This year I will be redoing the fairy garden from the very beginning. A do-over. How many times in life do we have to start over because we learned something new or different? Sometimes we can build on what we have learned, and sometimes we must start from the beginning. The “secret” is to accept it as a learning experience. Do I want to start over? Nope! Nor did I want to start over the countless other times in my life. But I did. Usually, it took me down a better path, sometimes not.
I’m getting better at accepting roadblocks and restarts. It’s not always fun to make better choices, and sometimes it is just hard. I read somewhere about “picking your hard.” It was about staying on the same path is hard and so is choosing a different path. So pick your hard. One of the things for me is choosing a healthier lifestyle. Staying on my current path may be easy, but hard for my body. Changing my path may be hard, but easier for my body. I will make the changes. It will be hard, but it will also be satisfying. This is a path I have gone down many times in my life, only to “re-route” back to the old, unhealthy, comfortable path. But here I am once again.
I am a little different now. Yes, I still have my struggles, but I have something else that is seeping into my life more every day. Happiness. Yep, I struggled to accept happiness in my life. Read that again, I didn’t struggle to find happiness, my struggle was to ACCEPT happiness.
My path might be a little harder now, but in the best possible way.