She Killed a Plant Once Because She Watered It Too Much.
Now She Worries If Love is Violence.
It was one random afternoon when Young Rachel got her first rose to raise. It was her friend Kiba who set the trend to those final-year students: to have a rose, and to treat it like a friend.
When Kiba brought her first flower — she named it Adam — Young Rachel was so fascinated by the beauty of its petals, becase,
How could something grown from living tissue arrange itself into such improbable symmetry? And how could a flower so similar to many others be romanticised that way?
So Young Rachel had herself one. She named it Luna.
Young Rachel watered Luna every morning when the sun hadn’t arrived, and the birds just started to chirp, while people in her dorm were going to get their breakfast or running to the liney bathrooms for their morning rituals. So Luna received water everyday, with Young Rachel hoping for nothing but to sustain her fascination towards the flower.
And no. It was not because of her beauty. In fact, Kiba’s Adam was the most beautiful among any other roses in the dorm. Her’s was dark red. Sacred red. While Young Rachel’s was just average. Luna was peach. But out of Young Rachel’s excitement, hence love, per se, she watered it. Everyday. Not knowing that too much water could be as fatal as too little.
So it died.
In the second week of young Rachel’s ownership, it died. Because she did not know that watering too much, could make them die.
And now, years later, she worries if love is a violence.
Maudy and the Irony of Abundance
I don’t wanna mislead you to think that I, think about pure love as something as simple as, “when you have an abundance of it, it’ll kill you.”
It is more like I have learned how each entity has its own jug: how much love they can compartmentalise, and therefore how much they can give and receive.
And I think about the recent issue on Maudy Ayunda.
Maudy was born privileged, I guess. Probably not in the mega-giga-wealthy sense of the people around her circles, but privileged in having parents who were aware of the value of education. Hence the films during her childhood. Hence the schools. Hence Oxford. And hence the doubled offer letters from both Harvard and Stanford. And there is nothing inherently wrong with being given that much.
To be given much, especially when what is given is education, opportunity, and the kind of parental awareness that tells a child that the world is much larger than the room she was born into, can instead make someone understand the complexity of the world better.
Unfirtunately, abundance has another side to it.
The more of something we are given, the easier it can become to live in a reality that is increasingly different from someone else’s. Not because we do not care, or because we are spoiled. But because abundance can quietly build an invisible wall between us and the realities that we have never had to physically encounter.
Sure, we understand that life has its duality in prosperity. We know that while some of us are given much, others are not. Unfortunately, the abundance of love we receive may mean that we do not even realise that this wall has layers. And deeper layers. And another deep deeper layers,
— such layers we did not even realise existed.
We can know that suffering exists. We can care about it. We can read about it, talk about it, donate to it, worry about it. And yet still not understand what it means to live inside it.
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And that is what I find interesting about Maudy’s recent issue.
Maudy’s recent Mindfulness in the Age of Bad News was, at least from the way she framed it, an attempt to talk about how to remain sane while being bombarded by bad news. The backlash came when that advice met a reality where bad news is not always something that arrives on a screen and can be switched off. For some people, the thing being reported is not merely news. It is their livelihood, their home, their environment, their family, their reality.
My take is that the advice itself was not necessarily wrong. I did share the same advice on my socials: that people may take a break if exposure to news about the government’s idiocracy overwhelmed us, long before the Karhutla issue. Because taking a break from bad news, especially when it begins to overwhelm you, can be a reasonable form of self-preservation.
Unfortunately, the problem in this recent issue was about the environment from which the advice was given.
Maudy was speaking from a life where there was enough moisture to allow for a pause from being moisturised. But that unsolicited advice is difficult to hear when your environment is already dry— when the soil is already cracking, and when the plant is already trying to survive.
We cannot talk about holding the water back from a peace lily, which actually needs consistently moist soil, as though every plant shares the same tolerance for dryness. Let alone ask a plant that is already dying to take a break from water.
And this is where I think about Luna again.
The abundance of love is not what kills Luna.
It is what happens when the person holding the watering can forgets that the rose has a different jug.
If knowing that it isn’t love that kills the plant, why does she still worry if love is violence?
Sometimes I wonder if love really can be violence.
Because reflecting on this — both Maudy’s case, and anything else that happens in this current real life — the thought comes back to Luna.
It is so easy to mistake what we have in abundance as something that must be good for another person. We have enough water, so we water. We have enough love, so we give. We have enough patience, so we expect another person to have it too.
We have learned how to survive with the things that have sustained us, and sometimes we forget that another person may have grown in completely different soil. And perhaps that is what happened with Young Rachel and Luna.
Young Rachel did not have bad intentions. She did not wake up one morning thinking that she would kill her rose. She simply knew that water was good for a living thing. She did not know Luna’s jug. And prolly, this is what we have to learn with people, too. That loving someone does not mean pouring everything we have into them simply because we have it to give.
But to love is to know what their jug looks like. Knowing how much they can hold. Knowing what kind of love they need, and what kind of love makes them feel overwhelmed instead. And perhaps, more importantly, knowing whether the abundance we carry is even compatible with the person standing in front of us.
Because I don’t want to end this by saying that too much love kills.
That would be too easy.
And I don’t want us to become afraid of our own abundance either. Because if you have a lot of love to give, then prolly you should give it. Just don’t assume that because it is love, it can never become too much for someone else.
A peace lily and a rose do not ask for the same amount of water. A plant that needs moist soil cannot be treated like one that prefers to dry between watering. And a person, I suppose, is no different. So perhaps love becomes violence not because we love too much, but because we love without learning what the other person can receive.
Sometimes the water is right. Sometimes the water is good. Sometimes it is even necessary. And one very rare time, it is just not meant for this plant, in this amount, at this time.
So I think about Luna again.
Luna didn’t die for nothing. Instead, she died to teach the Adult Rachel that love needs understanding of what love required.
