Of orchids and dandelions
Life is one darned challenge after another. Few things seem to turn out exactly as planned. Our coping with adversity roughly resembles either orchids or dandelions.
Orchids, valued as symbols of delicate beauty and luxurious fragrance, are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants. Like Spanish moss hanging on southern trees, they’re epiphytes who are able to get nutrients from air.
Walking across the Haleakala Crater moonscape on Maui, I came across a most beautiful orchid clinging to a vent gently wafting puffs of nutritious steam from the earth’s core.
But away from their natural environment, potted ornamental orchids are vulnerable to wet soil, direct sunlight, and hot and cold drafts. They’re best treated like household pets.
Dandelions, on the other hand, naturally grow almost everywhere and need only soil, a little moisture and sunlight to thrive. They’re edible and add nitrogen and minerals to the soil. Their bright flowers attract pollinating insects. And kids of all ages enjoy blowing their delicate balls of seeds into the wind.
But in the universe of green-carpeted lawns, they’re considered a perpetual nuisance to be removed. Internet advice for ridding this yellow wild flower includes regularly bathing them with poison, smothering them, using grazing animals like chickens to eat them, and hand digging to remove individual plants. With digging, unless the roots are completely removed the plant will regenerate itself.
Dandelions are models of biological resilience.
The goal of childhood and adolescence is developing resilience, learning how to bounce back from adversity and failure, to live reasonably contentedly as adults. It’s a process of self-immunization, gradually building up stores of inner strength, confidence and courage from making choices and adapting to changing and novel circumstances.
Successfully growing up requires a safe environment, parental guidance, and sufficient freedom to personally explore and learn about life. The trick for parents is keeping their own good intentions in check. Their guilt, anxiety over possible dire circumstances, or needs for feeling loved can complicate matters.
“Helicopter parents” hover over their children, overprotecting and over controlling their activities and placing extravagant expectations on their futures. These parents’ goals seem to include providing childhoods free from boredom, pain and failure while producing perfect adults.
Away from a parental-protection bubble, their children are essentially defenseless when confronted with life’s challenges in this capricious world. As adults they’re more likely to become anxiety ridden, depressed and drug or alcohol dependent. In a way they resemble hybrid orchid-pets unable to thrive in the face of modest environmental changes.
But despite dysfunctional childhoods, and having lived dangerously and chaotically as adults, their situations aren’t hopeless. Researchers at the Center for Resilience Research at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, discovered that survivors of even the most maladjusted adulthoods have the capacity to develop flexibility and begin making healthy accommodations to life.
The rehabilitation process involves tapping into roots, nearly forgotten remnant feelings of worthiness and unconditional love from someone who believed in them. Once regeneration is underway, like the incompletely extracted dandelion plant making its way back to sunshine, they garner necessary courage, strength and determination to thrive beyond what had seemed possible.
A key to contentment is bouncing back from adversity like a dandelion.
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