What do you grow?

I am up again tonight, thinking over my life decisions. This particular night, I am thinking about a conversation that my best girlfriend and I had around our first respective years of college. We were talking about getting married, having families, and growing up. At the time, she and I were working together at Hallmark, closing up on another slow weeknight. Around this same time, she had just met the man that would be her future husband. I remember that we were sitting on the floor behind the register, talking about the future. We were talking about all the bad stuff in the world; the hatred and the ugliness, as well as all of the good things. She was saying that the only way to combat all of the bad people, and the bad things in the world, was for the good people to grow and create more goodness. In that same vein, she now has 3 children that she is raising to be the next generation of good people.

Cut to me in the present time. I am thinking about my docs, most recently my dermatologist, telling me to hold off on the antibiotics and allow another cyst to develop, so that they can do another I&D, and find out what kind of infection is thriving in my body. Some people grow children and others grow disease, infection. Some people decide what will grow in their lives, and in their bodies. Other people have things "happen" to them, a lovely word that seems to absorb all responsibility. Illness, birth, love and death all "happen", all together and apart. Everything goes on simultaneously, weaving in and out of one another. Rather peculiar life is, I think.