ANOTHER Opportunity to Learn and Grow?!?

I fear this may be more of a rant than a blog.

Growth is wonderful. Objectively, I support it. I admire it in theory. I applaud it when it happens to other people.

Subjectively, I am tired.

Those who know me know I have a reflex whenever something goes wrong. 

A plan falls apart, a mistake is made, life throws in one more completely unnecessary plot twist, and I somehow shrug and say, “Well. I guess it’s another opportunity to learn and grow” all the while consciously inhaling and exhaling.

It sounds wise. It sounds resilient. I suspect to those who know me, it is also deeply annoying.

Because while I do believe that something useful can emerge from difficulty, I would also like to submit a modest counterproposal: perhaps there could occasionally be a pause between the difficulty and the growth.

A little intermission. Some time to process and stabilize before the next character-building experience arrives.

I think of growth in the garden this time of year. A tiny purple petal pushing up through wet soil and last autumn’s collapsed leaves. It has survived cold, wind, rain, being stepped on by creatures with no respect for boundaries, and still it appears. There it is again. Hope in botanical form.

I love that flower.

I simply do not wish to be that flower every single week. 

Earlier this week, a lovely customer named Jordanna sent me a reel. In it, a woman had gone back into her closet to see what still fit from the previous summer. Much of it didn’t. The humour of it landed because it was familiar. So many women know that moment. You reach for something that once felt ordinary and discover it has quietly become a referendum on your body, your age, your hormones, your stress level, your winter, your life.

And I found myself thinking that growth has many forms, not all of them spiritual.

Bodies grow. Bodies shrink. Bodies swell, recover, retain, release, heal, react, protect, change shape for reasons we understand and reasons we do not. They do this while the rest of us are trying to answer emails and remember where we left our keys—or, in Kim’s case, discover they were in the shoe she’d been wearing all day.

There is something unkind about clothing that treats change as a personal failure.

What I am grateful for, more than I can sometimes articulate, is that when my own body changes, my sariKNOTsari silks generally do not turn against me. They still fit. They still drape. They still allow me to exist without demanding an apology first.

It is a small thing until it is not. 

Yesterday, another customer, Jane, called the store. She said that three times in a few days she had recommended sariKNOTsari to women dealing with lymphoedema, breast cancer treatment, or recovery after mastectomy. Women who were saying nothing felt comfortable anymore. Nothing fit the body they had now. Nothing felt made for what they were carrying, physically or otherwise.

She told them to try our ponchos.

Then she called me to say that people need to know our clothing can be there for women during hard seasons.

I have thought about that more than once since.

We speak so casually about growth, as though it is always upward and inspiring. But sometimes growth is adaptation. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes it is learning to live in a changed body. Sometimes it is getting dressed when your life no longer resembles the one you expected.

Sometimes it is simply showing up again, tired but present.

The flower in the garden does not bloom because conditions became ideal. It blooms because that is what living things keep trying to do.

Perhaps we are not so different.

Life will keep handing out lessons I did not request. My body may continue its own mysterious negotiations. There will be more curveballs, more adjustments, more reminders that nothing stays fixed for long.

Still, it helps to keep a few forgiving things nearby.

For me, some of them are made of silk.