Sunday, February 26, 2012

Day 57: On Expending Energy

This morning as I was getting myself going (which seems to take me longer and longer to do each day), I was checking out the chamomile in my garden and was reminded of something that they do that is pretty cool.

The petals on chamomile flowers close at night, and depending on how sunny it is in the morning, they may stay like this until nearly noon.
At 8 a.m., some of the flowers are partially opened, some totally closed
 
When it gets sunny enough, they start to reopen. By 9:30 a.m. most of them have started to open.

:
By the time I got back from my walk at 11a.m., most of them had opened up fully.
Aside from being a cool thing to look at and apparently for me to take photos of, why am I writing about this here?

Because flowers that do this are teaching me a valuable lesson. That is that they know not to waste their precious energy on staying open at night because it is not necessary. They are protecting their reproductive parts (now there's an entirely different concept that merits several blog postings itself) and pollen when it's not needed. Some also do this to protect against bad weather and nighttime cold. The bottom line is that this eliminates the wasting of pollen. They protect their most valuable asset. Brilliant!

Too bad we (okay I), don't have that same automatic, adaptive technique, or at least I haven't discovered it yet but I am working on doing that. This past year has been one of the hardest in my life and I am working on changing many things. One day I might write about it, but, for now it is too close and too hard, and I can't even begin to think about doing that now.

What I can say is that during this process I have discovered that I seem to waste my valuable energy on those who aren't worthy of it, or who think I have an unlimited supply of it, or on things I can never have. My goal is to become like the petals on my chamomile, and to only open when there's a real need to instead of wasting my most valuable asset: me. 

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