The Gardener 85

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?

I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your door and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

My friend’s kid is currently in a classic phase of teenhood: insisting that he doesn’t need a coat, regardless of how cold it is. From our perspective as adults, it’s hard not to laugh at him, not only because not wearing a coat in a Wisconsin winter is frankly ridiculous, but also because we both remember going through similar phases ourselves. Why do so many kids decide that it’s cool to be cold? Is being warm-blooded a sign of weakness? Is it babyish to be comfortable? Apparently there’s just something deeply embarrassing about having a human body that’s susceptible to cold weather, and the best way to avoid embarrassment is to shrug off your coat and suffer.

Zoom out, though, and you start to realize that much of the embarrassment we encounter in our adult lives is similar. Needing help—whether it’s a coat to keep you warm, medicine to keep your brain healthy, or someone to hold your baby while you take a nap—can make us feel weak or even defective. It’s so easy to feel like you’re the only person who has ever experienced this particular vulnerability, and it’s so common to choose to suffer in silence instead of asking for help and using the tools at hand to help you get through it.

At some point in my own life, I realized that sharing my struggles could help other people get past their own embarrassment, and that seemed like a superpower. Being able to say, “You are not alone. I have struggled with this too,” suddenly seemed like the greatest gift I could give someone. By sharing my own struggles, I could show someone else that what they were feeling wasn’t weird or shameful, and that they shouldn’t be embarrassed to ask for help.