Letting Go
Next to my Leisure Heritage condo, there are two rows of wide spear-like bushes facing the Waikiki Community Center. During the recent drought, the front row was unscathed, but half of the back row had badly browned and shriveled. What an eyesore! For over a month, each time that I walked past that plot of land, I shuddered. In fact, I was so upset that I felt like snipping off the increasingly dead leaves myself; the gardener certainly had no interest in pruning the unsightly bushes. Aha! Since moving to an apartment in Waikiki, I don’t have any yard clippers, but I do have a trusty pair of scissors. I began to fantasize about using them stealthily at night to remove the offending foliage. I have always had trouble respecting property boundaries in my neighborhood; although it is hard for me to curb my enthusiasm for trimming nearby untended bushes, I have learned to restrain my compulsion. But my patience was becoming as threadbare as the discolored and disintegrating back bushes.
Today, however, I was stunned to see that all of the leaves on the back bushes had been hacked off. In their place were rows of little buds that would bring new life to the bushes. The gardener had done the right thing after all. My hypothetical solution was only a half-way measure; and I would have been guilty of trespassing if I had actually tried to fix the bushes as I saw fit to do.
Letting go isn’t easy for me. In pre-Covid-19 days, I was on a crusade to pick up litter everywhere I walked. One day after I rounded up a few cans near a dozing street person, she woke up and swore that she would slit my throat if I removed her cherished stuff again. That sure was a wake-up call for me. I now let the professionals collect litter.
And as Voltaire wisely says at the end of his harrowing novel Candide, it is best “to cultivate your own garden.”
schlomo
