Parenting Nasturtiums

      This summer I have enjoyed many blissful moments cultivating Nasturtiums. The results have been a product of synthesizing bits of information, from different walks of life. But when I piece them together, it creates an important lesson of life, which is worth sharing. So here I go.

      In a recent issue of Fortune magazine ( July 2009), Bill Gates was asked about the best advice he ever got. He said that his parents exposed him to a lot of different sports and things he wasn’t good at. He thought it was pointless at that time. He continues ” but it ended up really exposing me to leadership opportunities and showing me that I wasn’t good at a lot of things, instead of sticking to things that I was comfortable with”.

     At an unconscious level I almost parented the Nasturtiums. You see last year their seeds were exposed to different living environments, i.e. pots and ground. Here are the results. This year the seed packet said that they grow up to 6 feet in length. The point being since I knew how they perform in different environments, all I had to do now was to decide how to articulate their growth, so that they would reach their best potential.

      Now for a little diversion. The American architect, Louis Kahn was commissioned to design IIM (Ahmedabad). He chose brick as his main building material. Legend has it that he had a dream in which he asked a brick what it wanted to be?  And the brick replied ” arch”! Lo and behold he designed the entire campus with brick arches and even circles.

     Keeping Kahn’s experience in mind, I asked the seeds how they wanted to grow? The six feet length could be translated into a hi-rise structure and/or a lovely vine. If you let the seed grow by itself in the ground, it becomes a dense ground cover and one doesn’t get to see the structural beauty of its main shoot and side stalks. So it was decided to plant the seeds in ground and give some shoots vertical support and attach some to a railing, so as to grow like a vine. Four months of summer have produced the following results (see below: left – towers, right – vines).

     Both look abundantly leafy and happy. They vary in height from 8-10′ and the vines are equally long. Besides this they are still growing, so they might even go beyond doubling their potential of 6 feet! In conclusion, this whole process has subtly revealed an important lesson of life. The same seed can grow differently in different environments (pot, ground, with vertical support and vine support). As parents all we have to do is create the most suitable environment for our children to grow, so that they reach and even go beyond their maximum potential, just like the Nasturtiums this year.

Ratna

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      It is the natural and inherent impulse of life to seek to live more; it is the nature of intelligence to enlarge itself, and of consciousness to seek to extend its boundaries and find fuller expression.

- Wallace D. Wattles