Still Green

​There comes a point when a woman gets tired of standing over her own life with a grade book. I have spent so much of my life, trying to improve myself that I am just plain tired of it.

For years, self improvement was nearly an annual summer ritual for me. A new book, a new plan, a new little burst of hope that this might be the one summer that finally turned me into the woman I meant to be. And maybe some of it did me good. I am sure it did. But I can also see now that a lot of it came from the feeling that who I already was simply was not quite enough.

That is a weary way to live.

So when I see one of these prompts about what kind of woman I am cultivating this season and what seeds I need to plant, I understand the point, but I have to smile. I am not much of a gardener. I never have been. I like flowers, fine, but I would much rather cook, read, crochet, cut paper, glue, paint a room, or straighten up a drawer than fool with a flower bed. So if I answer the question at all, I have to translate it into language that fits my own life.

And what I keep coming back to is this: I do not want to spend the rest of my life being my own improvement project.

I would still like to be lovely. I would still like to be kind. I would still like to have some sparkle left on me. But the plain truth is, I am tired. My body does not do what it wants done. My energy does not rise to meet the day the way I wish it would. And after all these years, I am no longer convinced that the answer is to keep supervising myself.

Maybe what I need in this season is not more self improvement. Maybe it is more mercy.

I know there are things I have watered that never did me one bit of good – regret, loneliness, old heartaches, disappointment, and that mean little voice that always seems to think criticism is the same thing as help. But not everything painful in me is a flaw; some of it is grief. Some of it is awareness. Some of it is simply the sorrow of living long enough to know what I have lost.

So maybe this woman I am cultivating now is not a dazzling woman, not a reinvented woman, not a woman who has finally fixed herself. Maybe she is just a woman who is trying to be gentle with herself. A woman who would still like to be kind, truthful, and open to beauty. A woman who wants less scolding and more grace. A woman who is tired of treating herself like one more thing around the house that needs repair.

I may not want to grow a plant. However, I would like to keep alive whatever in me that's still green. For now, I believe mercy may be enough.