Three In A Row And I Stopped Buying Them

You walked past that shelf twice on Saturday and both times were deliberate.

The first time you looked, slowed slightly, and kept going. Then you came back down the same aisle for something else and did the same thing again, and the second time you were aware of doing it, which is why it has stayed with you.

Three plants in about two years. All dead.

The first one you overwatered, which you worked out afterward. The second one you are honestly not sure about. The third one you did everything you were told and it went anyway, and that is the one that settled it.

So you stopped. Not as a decision announced to anybody. You simply stopped bringing them home, and you have a sentence about it that you use lightly at other people's houses: I cannot keep anything alive.

You say it as a joke and it is not a joke. It is a conclusion, and you reached it on the evidence, and the evidence was three.

I want to look at the sentence rather than the plants.

Because it is not really about plants and you know that. That sentence has a wider reach in you than a windowsill. It is in the family of things you have quietly concluded about yourself, and those conclusions tend to accumulate, and each one narrows what you attempt next.

And it is built on three, in two years, with no controlled conditions, at least one of which you already know the cause of.

That would not settle any question about anything. If a friend told you she had concluded something about her character on that evidence, you would tell her it was thin.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow

There is a line in Ecclesiastes about waiting for the right conditions, and it is blunt.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. (Ecclesiastes 11:4, King James Version)

He that observeth the wind shall not sow.

Picture the man being described. He is a farmer, and he is doing something entirely sensible: watching the weather. He wants to plant when the conditions are right, so he studies the wind, and today the wind is not right, so he does not sow.

And tomorrow he studies it again, and the clouds are wrong. And the day after.

He is not lazy and he is not foolish. He is being careful, and his carefulness has a cost, and the verse names it plainly: he does not sow, and therefore he does not reap.

The point is not that conditions do not matter. The point is that a person who requires certainty before acting will act at no point, because the conditions are never entirely right and there is always a cloud somewhere.

And here is your version of watching the wind.

You are not going to bring a plant home until you are the kind of person who can keep one. That is the condition you have set, and it cannot be met, because the only way to become somebody who keeps a plant alive is to have a plant.

So the requirement is circular, and the shelf gets walked past, twice, on purpose.

And notice what the surrounding verses do with this. The chapter says to sow in the morning and in the evening, and not to know which will prosper. It is explicitly a passage about acting when nobody can say how it turns out, which is the exact thing three dead plants have taught you not to do.

A person who waits for the right conditions never sows at all, and certainty has never once been available before the act. Ecclesiastes 11:4 names the cost of watching the wind, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody walking past a shelf for the second time.

Attach it to something you already do

Here is the practical half, and it is the only mechanism in this article.

Those three plants died because they were somewhere you do not go.

I am fairly confident about that without knowing your house. A plant that lives in a room you enter twice a week gets watered when you remember, and remembering is the least reliable system a person has.

And when you forget, and the plant suffers, the conclusion is not "that was a bad location". The conclusion is "I cannot keep anything alive", because you were not trying to build a system, you were relying on care, and care that fails feels like a defect in the carer.

So the fix is not more care. You have plenty of care. It is to stop relying on remembering.

Put the plant in the path of something you already do every single day without fail.

Where the coffee gets made. Beside the kettle. On the counter where you stand for two minutes at the same time every morning, in a spot your body already visits without any decision being made.

Then the watering is not a task you have to recall. It is a thing you notice while you are standing there anyway, and noticing requires nothing of your memory at all.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is why this is different from the other three. Nothing about you needs to change. You do not have to become more attentive or better at this. You are attaching a plant to a habit that is already the most reliable thing in your day.

The three that died were in rooms you do not visit, and remembering has never once been a reliable system for anybody. The written word tells the farmer to sow without watching the sky, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who mistook a bad location for a defect in herself.

One, beside the kettle

So here is the assignment, and it is one plant and one place.

Put one plant where you make your coffee and water it when you next make one.

One. And get an easy one: ask whoever is in the shop for the hardest thing to kill and take whatever they hand you. Do not research it. Do not choose the one you like the look of most, and do not get two.

Put it beside where you make your coffee. Not near it. Beside it, in the space your hand passes over.

And then the watering rule, which is the whole thing: when you notice the soil is dry while you are standing there making coffee, water it. Not on a schedule. Not on a day of the week. When you are there anyway and it is dry.

And I want to head off the thing that will happen in about three weeks.

You will start checking it. You will find yourself standing there looking at it for longer, examining a leaf, wondering whether it has moved at all. And that is the beginning of the old pattern, where a plant becomes a test you are sitting.

It is not a test. There is no result being generated. If this one dies you will get another one and put it in the same place, and the second one will do better because it is the position and not you.

And do not tell yourself this is about proving anything. It is a plant beside a coffee pot. Nothing about your character is on the counter.

You are attaching it to the most reliable two minutes in your day, and nothing about you has ever once needed to change first. Ecclesiastes 11:4 says he that observeth the wind shall not sow, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody putting a small pot down beside a kettle.