With Purpose Success, part 45

Life is like a flower that blooms once. Think of a spring garden filled with newly opened flowers. Perhaps they are impatiens or begonias, or some other annual that starts as a seed, sprouts, grows and in time bursts into spectacular color. Then, at season's end, the petals fell off and the stalk wilts and the plant shrivels never to bloom again. The flower goes to seed. 

While its seeds can be replanted, the plant itself has but one life, one bloom, and it musters all its energy to make that one bloom as spectacular as possible. Many people (maybe even most) view their time on Earth in a similar light. You are born. You grow. You learn. You get a career, and you struggle to achieve as much as you can-to reach full bloom. Then you retire and wither away. With just one crack at being spectacular, you give it your all. But by fifty or sixty you are whatever you're going to be; you have reached your fullness and taken your shot, and you spend the rest of your days just fighting to keep the petals from falling off. The transformation from seed to flower-from birth to maturity-is breathtaking. 

But it occurs just once. With this model, there are no second chances. 

Life is like a flower that blooms every year. There is a second type of flower that I find far more interesting-the perennial. These are ingenious and hardworking little creations that burst forth every year for many years, repeating the cycle of going from seed (bulb, to be more precise), to sprout, to flower, and at season's end back to bulb, where they lie patiently waiting for the next season. They're still flowers. They have roots and petals just like their cousins, the annuals. But they are constitutionally different. 

They don't really die; they hibernate. They come back again and again and again. 

What's especially fascinating about perennials is that they never change. A pink tulip is a pink tulip-and will become a pink tulip again. 

It'll grow eighteen inches; have a green stem and green leaves, and six pink petals year after year. Perennials have staying power. They have the capacity to return many times. This isn't a bad model for life: do one thing well, take a break now and then, and come back and do it well all over again. You may enjoy re-creating the same flower, or successes, time and again, and taking some time off along the way to rest and gather yourself for the next season. This is a far better model for life than the flower that blooms but once. But it's also far from perfect.