Grit – in Plants

Guess what? A plant that was in the fridge for a month, gave out green shoots. Amazing resilience or grit displayed by this lemongrass plant.

Do all plants have a lot of grit ? I wonder.

A week back I ordered the Lemongrass plant sapling from Milk Basket. When we opened the package, the leaves had all dried up and it didn’t look alive to me. While I planted it, my mother kept saying that there were lemongrass stalks with their bulbs intact, in the fridge. That lemongrass had been ordered nearly a month back for making Thai Green Curry and the I had preserved the rest of it carefully.

Amma asked me to plant the lemongrass that was lying in the fridge as well. I did plant it with doubts about whether it was still alive after spending a month in a refrigerator ! The picture I have posted at the start of the blog is the lemongrass plant from the fridge 🙂

It set me thinking about man’s grit … we give up so easily. At the first sign of trouble, we would like to flee. Few of us are resilient, but its really a small number. We have much to learn from the plant world. The seeds wait patiently and germinate as and when they find the resources they need – soil, water and sunlight. Human beings are capable of finding every resource we need to help us achieve our goals, but we usually give up at the sign of the first failure. This lemongrass plant was lying dormant in a refrigerator for a month, but the minute it got the resources to sprout, it did.

How many of us are developing our grit ? That single quality differentiates those who succeed and those who don’t.

Note – The sapling that I got from Milk Basket didn’t sprout ! It wasn’t a live plant unfortunately.

Do read the book “Grit” by Angela Duckworth. Here’s the review that I posted – Book Review #10/50 – Grit by Angela Duckworth.