Tend to your garden.
In which I consider a whole new metaphor for understanding relationships
Just so I can remind myself: Here are the three steps of understanding relationships.
Somewhere in there is make a good guess. Sorry. That’s, like, step 2.5.
OK. This has become
way too confusing.
I’ve got you being a miner who is tempted to turn into a rabbit but becomes a gymnast instead then a metal worker who ends up playing the social scientist.
Too many costume changes.
We’re going to stick with one costume. Put on your Muck boots and get ready for a whole new metaphor.
I think of us human beings as occupying our own personal gardens. Where we plant our own flower beds, shrubbery, trees, whatnot. Where we (ideally) tend to ourselves by weeding, edging, mowing, redesigning the layout and composition, spending a good amount of time daydreaming in a hammock.
Our gardens (I can’t help it! I’ve got to make it a little more complicated!) sit atop our mine shafts and contain our own personal psychic reality. Which is always influenced by our underground beliefs, expectations, and emotions.
Weirdly, our psychic gardens move. (Think Hayao Miyazaki.) They move closer to other people and form a communal space. They move further away from people and allow for distance and privacy. All gardens have lovely garden walls with gates. We can raise or lower those walls at will; we can open our gates and let people into our personal reality and we can usher them out and close the gate.
And we can interact with each other over our garden walls. We can look at each other; we can talk to each other; we can listen; we can share information about what’s in our gardens, what works for us; we can keep our realities separate and therefore honor what’s mine versus what’s yours.
Now something happens. Someone gets in your garden and starts pulling up your plants or planting their own. Someone lobs a Molotov cocktail into your garden and blows up your favorite gnome. Someone knocks down an entire section of your garden wall and makes your garden their own. Someone treats you like a statue whose sole purpose is to provide them with a convenient spot to shit on.
Or you do this to them.
Congratulations! You’re in a relationship!
What do you do when someone disrupts the peace of your garden?
You gather your garden around you, centering yourself squarely in your personal space and examining the damage. That is, you make the turn toward yourself.
When you think you’ve got a handle on the mess — on what it feels like to stand in it — you turn back towards the other garden, at a distance, and wonder if their garden looks and feels the way yours does. (You make the flip.)
In most cases, it does. “Why?” you wonder. “Why is your garden such a mess that you had to muck mine up?” You make a guess. Which might be wrong. But it’s better than nothing. It’s way better than standing in a gutted garden and stewing or plotting revenge. And — bonus! — it might even fill you with compassion, which is a very very good emotion.
Once you’ve made a guess, you figure out what to do with it. Do you care enough about the relationship to try a repair? If yes, what might work? Some sympathy? Loving attention? Some questions about what it’s like to be them? A description of what happened and how that impacted you (your garden)? A clear directive about your boundaries, about your garden wall? What experiment are you willing to try?
If no — that is, if you don’t care to repair the relationship — you’ve got plenty of work to do to set your own garden right. Without rancor or hatred or self-pity or free-floating residual negative emotions.
Tend to your garden. Make it well again.