Journey Within -- A Little Bit Dead

There are some generally agreed upon conditions in life that are quite black and white.

You can’t be ‘a little bit pregnant’ for example. You are or you aren’t.

Or, you can’t be ‘a little bit dead’.

But my garden is teaching me otherwise regarding death. And life for that matter.

I have a lovely creeper along my back fence. It fills in the chain-link and provides some privacy for me and for my neighbour whose kitchen windows are just a walkway from my fence and about the same distance again from my own windows.

From time to time, I have to cut the creeper back because it grows quite voraciously. I also have to pull out the dead and dried stems as parts of the plant die off.

What I’ve discovered is that sometimes I will remove a dead stem, only to find that it was dead between two living parts. And sadly, removing the dead bit causes at least one of the live stems to wither and die, as the tenuous connection to its life source has been severed.

It’s a bit of a marvel that this can happen. That my plant is, in fact, ‘a little bit dead’.
And yet the dead parts are not hindering growth. They are helping to accommodate it, or at the very least, helping to maintain it.

So every time I trim the vines, I am careful to remove the truly dead and useless bits, and only those, so that I don’t destroy any connected parts that are alive.

And every time I trim the vines, I think about how it is a little bit dead. And how we, in our own lives, can sometimes (or always) also be a little bit dead.

With my own recent experiences, the death of a loved one springs to mind as an example, as this is a recent experience. I’m sure there are others...loss of a pet, traumatic event…
(What are yours?)

We lose someone we dearly love, who has been an integral part of our lives, and suddenly, the reality is that they are gone.
A void is left.
An emptiness.
A bit of us dies with them.

And yet, we don’t die.
We continue to live, even though we have that little bit of deadness in ourselves.
True, it may slow us down, even stop us sometimes, but in the end, we continue to live, with it and around it.

The event and the change and the dead bit contribute to our growth, and without it, we would be quite different. So we don’t want to cut it out, but rather acknowledge it, and the role it plays in shaping us. But we do not want to dwell on it. Focus on the good it teaches and the direction is has given to our lives.

I feel a little bit dead for a number of reasons and events in my life, but I am not dead. I push on and continue to live and grow because of…and yes…in spite of….the dead bits. Like the creeper, we can thrive despite being ‘a little bit dead’.