Have You Fed Your Life Today?

Last summer, I fertilized my outdoor potted plants for the first time ever. It’s one of those things I always meant to do, and I’d purchased the organic fertilizer months before. For some time, the bottle sat on my patio table. If it’s right in front of me where I see it a dozen times a day, I’ll do it, right?

Wrong.

So, finally I did it. It didn’t take long.

Within days, the plants were looking healthier, greener. Shoots started appearing, even on the very scruffy-looking rabbits-foot fern in my entryway.

Within weeks, there was a transformation. In my entryway – now a veritable fern grotto! – the rabbits-foot fern is a glowing green ball of healthy growth. The maidenhair fern is dark, deep green, and so huge that you can’t find my front doorbell behind it. The staghorn fern, which had been so sick-looking I was considering throwing it away, is also deep green and putting out shoots. On the back patio, the succulents delight the hummingbirds with regular blossoms and are literally popping out of their pots with health and growth.

Now, bear with me here, because I’ll admit this is a little hokey – but doesn’t your life deserve that kind of attention? Unlike me, you may be really good at fertilizing your plants – but how much time do you spend feeding your life?

Our tendency is to get wrapped up in the demands of day-to-day life, the routines that we carve out for ourselves to maintain some sense of order. We hurry from one moment to the next, getting the kids off to school and ourselves off to work, rushing between meetings and email and the phone, joining a client or colleague for lunch, hustling home at the end of the workday to run errands and take the kids to soccer or dance practice. When we do have time to sit down and just breathe for a moment, it’s often with a stunned sense that there must be something we still haven’t done, some task or appointment that’s hurtling towards us that we haven’t spotted yet.

We all know the value of eating well-prepared, nutritious, and tasty food to provide fuel for our physical selves. Most of us also follow a spiritual practice, whether through an organized religion or in personal, sometimes non-traditional ways, thereby providing fuel for our spiritual selves.

The physical and the spiritual are two of the three facets of life. The mental/emotional, which I call the psyche, is the third, and tends to be overlooked and left unfertilized. There are few, if any, traditions that fuel this third aspect; those that do are often remarkably bad at it (with apologies to the many good schoolteachers I have known), and are not easily available after we complete our formal education.

The psyche needs rich experiences and frivolous play to grow and blossom, and such fuel can be hard to find in this over-scheduled, over-busy, and always-urgent era. Endless routine and habit poison and stunt our psyche, and it often becomes dormant, leaving us wondering, “Whatever happened to the college student who sat up late debating politics, history, and art, went to poetry readings, and spent hours playing and singing in the student lounge?”

I encourage you to find ways to nourish all three aspects of your life. Evaluate which you have neglected most – I’d be willing to bet it’s your psyche – and find a way to provide a little organic fertilizer on a regular basis. You’ll be astonished at the vibrant growth that will result – and who knows what hummingbirds your flowering may attract?

“A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing -a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.” Ken Wilbur, philosopher and theoretical psychologist.