Integritus Prime

Recently, I have been thinking about how often we make rejection, failure, and mistakes mean something permanent about us. We take one closed door, one awkward moment, one plan that did not work, and turn it into a story about our worth. But Nature does not do that. Nature responds to change much more practically. It adjusts, redirects, and keeps growing. Two plants on my office balcony reminded me of that in a very clear way the other day.

The first is my money plant. It has little creeper-detection tendrils that help it to sense where to go and what to hold onto. At one point, it was growing downward toward the ground. I wanted it to grow upward instead, so I gently tied it with string to a rod so it could change direction and creep up along the railing. What I noticed after that was so interesting. The tendrils that had been active in the old direction seemed to deactivate and whither. The plant stopped putting energy into the path it was no longer taking.

I did the same when I kept asking a friend to help me by doing the coding for my app. After he said no twice, I decided to brainstorm how I could do it myself. I stopped giving energy to the idea that someone else had to do it for me. I went into the direction of doing it myself.

There is such a simple lesson in that. When your direction changes, stop feeding the old one. Stop putting energy into the path that is no longer yours. Many of us do the opposite. We keep replaying what happened. We keep thinking about the person who rejected us, the opportunity that did not work out, the version of the plan that failed, or the mistake we made last month, last year, or ten years ago. We keep trying to make something live that has already ended. We keep sending emotional energy into the past and then wonder why we feel stuck.

I’m not saying reflection is bad. It is important to learn from things. It is important to take responsibility when we have made mistakes. It is important to feel disappointment when something mattered to us. But there is a difference between learning and lingering. There is a difference between honest reflection and repeatedly draining yourself by staying attached to a direction you are no longer going in. At some point, we have to decide to put our energy into the life that is in front of us, not the one that has already shifted.

The money plant did not keep investing in the old route just because it had started there. It adapted to the support available and put its energy where growth was still possible. There is wisdom in that.

The second example is the bougainvillea that had begun infiltrating my balcony. It had to be cut back. But after it was cut, the stem did not just give up. Instead, it produced multiple new shoots in various new directions. That, too, felt like such a powerful lesson. When Nature is cut off, it often responds by expanding its options. It sends out more feelers. It explores several directions at once. It looks for what might work next.

I grieved when I was told I had to give up dancing, including Zumba, due to knee injuries. I could only swim, which I was afraid to do. After some time, I pushed myself into this direction – I started to go to the pool, bought equipment, bought a membership, and used YouTube videos to coach myself. I explored USP pool when mine was closed for two weeks. I tried swimming in the ocean, and now I’ve been approached to join the Masters club, which I intend to do.

This exploration is the opposite of what many of us do when we feel rejected or when something fails. We shut down. We become discouraged and stop reaching. We decide that because one attempt did not work, we should retreat completely. But maybe there is another way to respond. Maybe when one path closes, the next step is not to collapse, but to explore more widely. Maybe it is time to have more conversations, consider more options, test more ideas, and stay more open than before.

I want to be clear that this does not mean pretending not to care. Being cut off hurts. Rejection hurts. Failure can be humbling. Mistakes can shake us. Sometimes we need time to rest, grieve, and process. But after that, there is a choice. We can keep staring at the cut, or we can begin looking for where new growth is possible. We can come back with more perspective, more flexibility, and more options than we had before.

So these are the two lessons I am taking from Ma Nature right now. First, stop giving energy to the directions you are not going in anymore. Stop feeding the past when your life is asking you to grow somewhere new. Second, when you are cut off, rejected, or when a direction fails, send out multiple feelers. Look for other viable options. Nature does not treat setbacks as the end. It treats them as a cue to adapt to new beginnings. I think there is a lot we can learn from that.