Episode #19: Say You're a Gardener

Stop the search for a lid. Instead, plant a garden.

The pot is always empty…so stop searching for a lid.

There’s a little book called “How to Love” written by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ve been reading the short passages from this book to start my mornings lately and there is a newsworthy reason why:

Recently, this January, I got engaged to my partner of 10 years (!). We both asked each other, said yes, and gave each other bracelets in lieu of rings to commemorate our connection with one another.

I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s book to help me reflect on what it means to be “engaged” in the lead up to our proposal. An interesting outcome of that reflection, and the one I want to share with you today, looks at how we as individuals search for meaning (love, connection, success, and everything in-between) from a surprising angle—that of suffering.

Suffering is often thought of something brought upon us by another person or by our own inner demons. We think we suffer because we didn’t get the job or because we had one-too-many drinks the night before and now have a nasty headache. “It’s his fault!” or “It’s all my fault,” we say to ourselves. How to Love teaches us instead that the reason we suffer is not because of him, her, you, or me. We suffer because we are human and we must.

To put it in a metaphor offered by Thich Nhat Hanh, we are all pots in search of a lid.

He writes:

“We believe that our lid is somewhere out there, and if we look very hard, we’ll find the lid to cover our pot.”

Likewise, when we search our lives for “the right thing”—a lover, an employee, a new gadget, a nice dress, or the golden solution to our business problem—if we think of that thing as a lid to our troubles we are likely to grow dependent on the function of that thing. Yet, the problem remains boiling underneath…

In reality, the function of a lid is to cover up our emptiness. If we don’t engage deliberately with that emptiness we cannot move forward.

Luckily, TNH offers an alternative to being a kettle in search of a lid. He suggests that we become someone who can generate care for yourself first, so that when you find the right person, employee, or solution, you can help them from a place of generosity and care because you’ve already curated these habits for yourself and developed a method for utilizing those habits when needed. In other words, understand your pot for what it is, an empty vessel, and you won’t need a lid to cover anything up.

When you examine a conflict at work, in your relationships, or when looking for love—ask yourself if you’re looking for something to cover up a pain point. If so, you might need to take a longer, but ultimately more rewarding, search to understand what’s operating underneath that need.

Let me use an alternative metaphor to use in place of kettles searching for lids. You are a gardener in search for fellow partners. Michael, my partner, is not a lid to my pot. He is my partner in the shared mission to curate our happy little plot of dirt together and make it something special.

Together, we know what seeds to water and what weeds to pull. This plot of space in the world, this moment in time that we’ve cultivated together, would not survive, or if it did, would not flourish, if we depended upon on each other to cover up our suffering and problems. Our garden flourishes because we do important self-work first, like knowing how to forgive and accept our own selves, so that we can do the same for our partners (which is always easier to do!). We’re not perfect and don’t expect the other person to be either.

You may not “love” your colleagues or your work in this sense. But approaching your conflicts with them mindfully—as something to be examined with curiosity—versus a series of (empty) kettles to be covered up with lids—might be help bring you closer to finding peace with yourself and with those to whom you share your life.