Bloom Where You’re Planted
The title might be, “Re-Bloom Where You’re Re-Planted.”
Because “Bloom Where You’re Planted” might mean to bloom where you were born.
But Lasairiona McMaster’s “Bloom Where You’re Planted” is about how to thrive where you’ve been re-seeded, landed anew, and you’re ready to sprout.
Dare I suggest that only once her expatriation was (nearly) over did this book come to her. I believe although we learn while doing, we learn even more deeply when we’re “done” and can look back and see what happened.
Lasairiona first picked up from Northern Ireland to Houston, Texas, USA. After a good 7-year stint there, she spent another in India. Not Indiana, but India.
Now she’s back in Northern Ireland and her “travel bug” has bitten.
It’s more than travel.
Travel is a week to a maybe-not-so-far-away place where you read a novel, eat too much, and maybe wave to a local–who’s a stranger to you.
She moved. She expatriated. She sold stuff, packed up, and moved her entire life.
It wasn’t always easy. In fact, I dare say it was more often not easy. She said something about how she cried for the first six months.
Now she says she wouldn’t trade any of it for anything else.
What could someone possibly entice you with but told you that you were going to cry for the next six months?
It better be good.
It better be really, really good.
Apparently, it was.
So what happened to her in those 10 years of being abroad? Away from friends and family, continents and oceans distant from everything she knew and loved?
Oh, and the six months of crying?
What could be worth that?
- Transformation
- Adventure
- The unknown
People say they want that stuff but, let’s be honest, if we were told we’d cry for six nights to get any of those three things we’d probably give up and change the channel to yet another Netflix series.
Order more pizza. Pop more popcorn.
Not cry for six nights. Or six months.
Then what? Then our seed is not replanted. Can we bloom where our seed has been planted? Does it need to be replanted in order for it to bloom?
I’m going to take the metaphor another step and go with the caterpillar and the butterfly.
Caterpillars are awesome. All those legs. Flexibility. Endless leaves to munch on.
Life is good.
Why bother with all of that cocoon business? How long is that going to take, anyway?
Let’s just keep walking on all of those legs and keep eating. Life is good.
Right?
I mean, right?
Not all of us we meant to be butterflies. There’s a cost, a time zone alteration, a transformation that needs to take place.
It’s not on Netflix. It’s not in a book. It’s through action.
Picking up, leaving everything you know and love, and moving to a place you don’t yet know or love.
You might not ever know it or love it.
It’s that journey that Lasairiona is sharing with us. It’s that journey that, if I may be so bold as to state, that is one of the solutions to big challenges such as:
- Happiness
- Community
- Immigration
I know, big stuff. But when we don’t know things (or people), we tend to shy away from them.
When we get to know them, when we step out of our own comfort zone and into a new one, it opens up a pathway that might have previously been closed and it might open up a path in someone else that was also closed.
Travel and living abroad opens us, expands us, and connects us.
Dare to take a step out of your own world and live in someone else’s shoes for a while.
It doesn’t have to be Texas or India, in fact, it doesn’t matter where it is just that you go there and live there and experience it and share your experiences with others who might be thinking about doing it, too.
You might just change someone else’s life for the better.
Who knows, you might just change yours.
