Sometimes you need a bigger pot

I spent the first two days of my sabbatical repotting plants.

Which, now that I think about it, feels a little too on the nose.

There is a large retaining wall on the side of our house that has always felt too bare. Too much concrete. Not enough life.

So I spent two days outside.

Hammering edging into the ground.

Moving my silver sheen pittosporum.

Hauling bags of soil.

And repotting two jasmine espaliers into much bigger planters.

One jasmine was struggling.

The other was thriving.

And somehow, both needed to move.

Sometimes you move because something isn’t working.

One of the jasmine plants hadn’t been doing well.

Its leaves were thinner. Less green. It looked tired.

It had spent the summer in a corten steel planter, and my guess is that all that metal sitting in the sun had simply gotten too hot.

Moving that plant made sense.

Something wasn’t working.

It needed more soil. More room. Different conditions. A better chance to recover.

This is the kind of change we understand.

Something becomes unbearable, so we leave.

A job burns us out.

A relationship becomes unhealthy.

A place stops feeling like home.

Something breaks, and eventually we accept that things need to change.

But the other jasmine was different.

It was doing just fine.

Sometimes nothing is wrong.

The second jasmine was healthy.

Green.

Growing.

There was no urgent reason to move it.

I could have left it in that planter for another year. Maybe two.

But I wasn’t thinking about the plant it was that day.

I was thinking about the plant I wanted it to become.

Eventually, I want the jasmine to climb across the retaining wall. I want green to soften all that concrete. I want the vines to stretch outward and upward and fill spaces that are empty today.

And I didn’t want to repot it again in two or three years.

The planter it was in was perfectly fine for the plant it had become.

It just wasn’t big enough for the plant it could still become.

I keep thinking about that.

Because we often believe we need a good enough reason to change our lives.

Something has to be wrong.

We have to be unhappy enough.

Burned out enough.

Certain enough.

But sometimes nothing is wrong.

Sometimes the job is still good.

The people are still good.

The life you’ve built is still good.

And you can be deeply grateful for all of it.

You just need more room.

More room for your family.

More room to rest.

More room to create.

More room to follow something you can’t quite name yet.

Gratitude doesn’t require permanence.

Sometimes you can love the place that helped you grow and still know it is time to grow somewhere else.

Sometimes you simply need a bigger pot.

But repotting is disruptive.

There is a surprisingly violent part of repotting a plant.

You have to pull it out of the place where it has learned how to live.

You loosen the dirt around the edges.

You dig.

You tug.

Sometimes the roots have wrapped themselves around the container so tightly that the plant doesn’t want to come out.

A few roots might break.

Others might need to be cut.

And then suddenly the plant is sitting there completely exposed, with this tangled network of roots that hasn’t seen daylight in years.

Then you place it somewhere completely new.

New soil.

New surroundings.

More space.

No familiar edges.

And somehow we expect the plant to immediately understand that this is a good thing.

But plants don’t always do that.

Sometimes they go into transplant shock.

They wilt.

They droop.

Growth pauses.

For a little while, the plant can actually look worse than it did before.

Even if the new pot is bigger.

Even if the soil is better.

Even if you’ve given its roots more room than they’ve ever had.

I think there is something very human about that.

Even the change you wanted can feel hard.

I underestimated how much work had been giving shape to my days.

Not just the meetings and deadlines.

The smaller things, too.

Opening my laptop in the morning.

Checking Slack.

Looking at my calendar.

Knowing someone needed an answer from me.

Knowing something had to ship by Friday.

There was always a next thing.

And then suddenly, there wasn’t.

Now I wake up and the day is mine.

Which is exactly what I wanted.

And some mornings, that much freedom feels strangely disorienting.

There is no work laptop.

No familiar work desk.

No meetings telling me where to be.

No project already waiting for me to continue it.

There is just space.

I feel excited by it.

I feel curious.

And I also feel a little lost.

There are so many directions my roots could go that I don’t know which one to follow yet.

Maybe you’ve felt this too.

Maybe you were laid off and the structure of your days disappeared overnight.

Maybe you became a parent and your old rhythms no longer fit.

Maybe you retired after decades of having somewhere to be every morning.

Maybe you moved to a new city.

Maybe a relationship ended.

Maybe you chose the change.

Maybe the change chose you.

There are so many moments in life when the old container no longer fits and the new one doesn’t quite feel like home yet.

For a while, that can feel a lot like being lost.

The roots will find their way.

A newly repotted plant doesn’t know where every root is going.

It just begins.

A little deeper here.

A little wider there.

Searching for water.

Searching for nutrients.

Learning the shape of its new environment.

Maybe we aren’t that different.

Maybe we don’t always need to know exactly what comes next.

Maybe sometimes the work is simply to notice where we are growing.

To follow what gives us energy.

To rest where we need to rest.

To let new roots form before demanding that they become something.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll keep checking on the jasmine.

I’ll give it water.

Sunlight.

And mostly, time.

Eventually, its roots will begin moving into all that new soil.

It will settle.

Then, hopefully, it will climb.

Across the wall.

Around the trellis.

Into spaces it could never have reached from its old planter.

And perhaps I’ll do the same.

Right now, I don’t know exactly what this season will become.

For once, I’m trying not to demand an answer.

I’m trying not to mistake uncertainty for a wrong decision.

Or discomfort for a sign that I should have stayed where I was.

Maybe this is simply what transformation feels like from the inside.

A little exposed.

A little disoriented.

A lot more space than you’re used to.

And someday, I might look back at this strange period between one version of my life and the next and realize:

I wasn’t lost.

I was just repotted.