In my tale of the foolish gardener

I invite you to reconsider “happiness” as the goal in life. I invite you to give some thought to new goals such as peace, meaning, and personal growth.

To spend a life seeking happiness is akin to the gardener whose only purpose is to get flowers to bloom, hoping they will never whither. The natural cycle of life will cause great distress to this gardener. Flowers will undoubtedly die. This gardener will soon realize she has only a couple of options. She could buy plastic flowers, and pretend she achieved her dreams based on a fabricated, perfume-less, and lifeless reality that will never fool a butterfly. Or she can learn to enjoy the process, the comings and goings, the care she will offer in the meantime, the unshakable hope of what’s to come, and the imminent excitement for her plants’ flourishing, untainted by fear of their inevitable decline.

The good gardener, the one that pays attention to life and it’s rules, the one that admires the good instead of focusing on the bad, knows to honor each season, and learns to enjoy life because of them.