It’s been a pretty busy last several weeks and my mind has been really focused on home. Three things overlapped at once - my daughter started at her new school, my own school year kicked off at the naturopathic college where I teach, and we finally made the call on which contractor we want to renovate our condo.
If you've been reading for a while, you might remember the piece I wrote a while back about the strange pattern I kept noticing across our contractor quotes - the one where every contractor who was Chinese told us the exact opposite of what every contractor from another background told us, about the same ceiling. You can read it here if you’re interested.
For anyone who was following along - a little P.S. - we decided not to lower the ceiling for the pot lights and I can’t help wondering if we made that decision because we’re Chinese. Something to explore another time.
As I was thinking about what I wanted to share with you this week, the conversation that most stood out for me was one I'd had with my daughter the week before school started.
She's introverted, and one of the things I know can make her feel bad in a new situation is not having friends yet, or trying to play with a group of kids and realizing partway through that she doesn't actually like them. She told me that when she started her old school, she sat on the bench by herself for a full week because she didn’t have anyone to play with, and when she tried to join a group of kids, they told her no. It broke my heart - not only did it hurt me that she felt lonely but also it came out so powerless. Like she was just waiting for someone to decide if she could be their friend or not.
I wanted to get ahead of that this year, before she started at a new school. I sat her down and told her I wanted her to think about who she wanted as a friend as she walked in on the first day. Not to wait around and see who might pick her but that she gets to decide too.
I had saved this analogy of a tree that I'd been meaning to walk her through for a while, and this felt like the right moment.
The leaves are the people who show up when things are easy and blow away with the first bit of wind. Someone got a better invite, someone's in a bad mood, someone found a newer friend. The leaves go and change frequently.
The trunk is the people who stick around when you're not fun to be around, when you've had a bad week, when there's a fight to work through. They're not going anywhere at the first sign of difficulty. They’re strong in your life.
The roots are the people who are really there for you; the ones who help you become stronger and better. They are happy for you when you succeed and encourage you when you don’t. The ones who are with you through everything, who know you and stay with you as you grow and learn and change. There aren't many of them in life but there doesn’t need to be.
She took it in the way six-year-olds take things in, I think. Half listening and trying to understand, half already thinking of the next story she wanted to tell me. But she came back to it a few days later and asked me which kind her cousins were, and which kind her old best friend from her old school was, and I could tell she was sorting people in her head with the frame.
The part I didn’t tell her
What I didn't tell her, and probably should have at some point, is that trunk and root people will annoy you.
I say this because I've been thinking about my own trunk and root people lately, and there's not one of them who doesn't have something that gets under my skin from time to time.
One of my closest friends is somebody I've known for over 25 years. She is honestly the sweetest, most easy going, most caring person I know. Any restaurant, any place, any idea - as long as you want it, she’ll do her best to make it work.
The way this shows up as a trigger for me is that once we've made a decision, she'll keep offering me alternatives in case one of them is better for me. Different option, different time, different day, in case my week is heavy. It comes entirely from generosity. She wants me to have the version that fits my life best.
I'm a planner. Once a decision is made, I've closed the loop and I've moved on. I feel like I make so many decisions in a day between work, home, kid, business, that when I've closed one, I don't want to reopen it. It's not about the alternative being worse. It's that I don't have the bandwidth to weigh it again.
We've known each other long enough now that when she starts doing it, I'll say "you're doing it again," and she'll laugh. Or she'll get partway through a sentence and go "I know this is going to annoy you, but…" and I'll let her finish it anyway, because sometimes the alternative is actually better and I want to hear it.
She is a root relationship. It doesn't feel breezy at every moment. It has a whole set of small friction points that have taken decades of friendship to be able to say to each other.
All the trees in our lives
When I told my daughter how to spot the roots, I didn't tell her that once she finds them, part of the deal is getting annoyed by them sometimes, and staying anyway. That's probably a conversation for when she's older.
But thinking about the tree analogy over the last several days has made me realize how many other things in life it works for.
Which habits are the leaves - the ones I pick up when I'm feeling motivated and drop the moment life gets busy or tired or inconvenient. Which ones are the trunk, the ones I come back to even in the stretches where nothing is going smoothly. Which are the roots, the small few that everything else seems to grow out of.
The same idea with the things in our home. The stuff sitting on shelves that I've been telling myself I'll get to for months. The pieces I actually use every day. The few things I would take with me if we ever moved again.
Similarly with attention and time. Which conversations, projects, and relationships have been running mostly on politeness or habit and would blow away with the first real wind. Which ones I keep coming back to because something deeper is asking me to.
Now that the frame is in my head, I’ve started running things through it - a habit, an object, an invitation - and every so often something I hadn't looked at in a while ends up somewhere different than I thought it would.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
The people who never annoy you are usually the ones who aren't around long enough to.