Weird title, I am well aware, my dear readers. But, bear with me. Have I truly ever steered you wrong before? Actually, it is quite possible. Regardless, this thought came up while I had the pleasure of a totally unsupervised visit to my local plant nursery for Mother’s Day. There were a number of people there who bemoaned how they had ‘no green thumb’ and ‘always killed plants.’ The interesting part was that all the hardcore gardeners also said the same thing. They all felt they killed a lot of plants. Indeed, I would say I hardly have a great thumb. The plants that do best are the ones that live outside, far away from my deadly influence. 

A Numbers Game

When I briefly had a flower farming teacher and was in my apprenticeship, I had the same mindset as these other people. I thought that gardeners and farmers were the gifted, chosen few who managed to keep plants alive. Instead, my teacher pulled back the metaphorical curtain and showed me her calculations. She always anticipated a lot of plants dying, and had a general idea of how many seeds she had to sew of each species to get roughly what she wanted. 

And that was only after years and years of careful note taking. I still didn’t believe it. So my teacher asked me to sew just a ton of seeds and thin them out the way she showed me. And I felt terrible. Every time I had to thin out the seedlings for their own sake, I felt like I was just snuffing out life for no reason. And yet…my plants did so much better than they ever had before. 

The difference was not that one person was infinitely blessed and chosen, but rather that they played a numbers game and made way more attempts at getting plants to live. So, by the math, more plants survived. 

Thinning out plants is still something that bothers me to this day. But, gardening and nurturing life are far closer to death than I had initially thought. It was a shock, but one that I am slowly getting used to. 

What Else Can We Kill? 

I think that we have a twisted relationship with failure. I think that, myself included, we are all very terrified of failure. As if failure or something not working out 100% in our favor is some sign of incurable character weakness. 

I know that I’ve written about the freedom to stop and the freedom to start at will. But, I think that we could also use another freedom—the freedom to fail. The freedom for things to ‘not be so great.’ Or even just ‘to not be perfect.’ It’s fine if stuff doesn’t turn out right the first time. The second time. Or even the 33rd time. So this is me, a random person on the internet, giving you permission to fail. Not even just once, but forever. I know I’ll be killing plants far into the future, no matter wherever I may end up. 

Also probably accidentally gluing my fingers together as well. 

So here is a question: what do you need the freedom to fail at?