Really, I know, but it's Friday, so I think it's fair game :)
I have three plants in my office: an orchid whose blooms are long gone, and then two plants of unknown heritage, which I inherited from colleagues at Sun. The orchid is doing just fantastic; the leaves are green and full, as are its little rooty tendrils. And the one on the right is doing well: inherited when a colleague was laid off last year, but she's returning to Sun next week, so I hope to give it back to her in good health. It's the plant in the white container that I'm having trouble with.
It's my oldest office plant, inherited probably four or five years ago from my friend Nancy, a former technical writer turned UI designer, who wanted to save the plant from a slow death in the usability test lab. I took the plant into my bright sunny office, and it thrived -- multiple stalks, big leaves, shiny, green, and happy.
At the time I took the plant, I was a technical writer, like Nancy had been before me. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next, but I knew I didn't want to be a technical writer any longer. I was considering becoming a Six Sigma Black Belt, or moving back into instructional design, or getting into user research and product design. I was fortunate enough to have been accepted into the SEED mentoring program, so that was the venue that I used to explore my next steps.
Over the years, as my education and career moved into the field of user experience, I wondered if the plant was some kind of subliminal reminder that I could do what Nancy had done before me. A visual totem to my new path.
So, it's with that meaning and history that I am now concerned about the plant -- maybe it has simply done for me what it came to do. Maybe if I was a better caretaker, I'd pass it along to some future UI designer. And yet, I don't feel ready to let it go, either through death or re-gifting. Not that I have much control over it, really. It gets light and water like the healthy plants in my office. I suppose the one last thing I can try is some fresh soil and a new container ... and then I have to accept the outcome.