Re-potting

“Repot yourself and you will bloom again,” said John Gardner in a talk at Stanford some years ago. Put a plant in fresh surroundings and it has more room to grow…to develop. It’s the same with people.

A person goes along for a period of time building a career or reputation or competence in a certain field. He or she learns the ropes, rules, and intricacies of the subject and how to use, leverage, or overcome them as required. Some level of success is achieved, perhaps modest, perhaps great. Regardless, at a point in time the action becomes routine. Boundaries are reached. Alliances are stable. There is predictability, maybe to the point of boredom. Learning falls off. It may be time to re-pot. Working doesn’t tire us; dullness does.

Gardner went on: “One of the reasons people stop learning it that they become less and less willing to risk failure.” They are afraid to tinker with the formula they have honed. Some people have a wide range of experiences over, say, 30 years of working life; many have two years experience fifteen times over. The curiosity of the repeaters shriveled in the process.

Repotting is proactively moving on from one phase of a career or life to a new one. It requires the confidence to say that there is more to life than endless re-runs—pursuing the same goals using the same ideas, style, talents, and toy collection. While repotting may appear complicated, it actually can be an act of simplifying. When repotted, a person returns to zero, re-starts. There are new possibilities and challenges and space. There is opportunity for self-renewal.

Here is a true story that nicely represents the process and “why” of repotting.

ACT I

In 1985, Maurice Lamm was the Rabbi at the Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, CA. He had built a successful career and at age 55 and he was respected, loved, and fully engaged in his chosen work. He decided to leave the rabbinate. He wrote a newspaper article about the experience. His comments included:

“Life was not meant to be a one-act play. I’m convinced of that. I am astonished by how many well-meaning people cannot comprehend this. They don’t understand that my changing is not a denigration of Act I, but its fulfillment. And it is not burnout or cop-out. I want to do even more—but on a larger map, answering to different demands. And please don’t dismiss this as just a natural consequence of a midlife crisis. It is not an emotional fix that I am looking for. It’s simply the only reasonable way to go.”

ACT II

It takes courage to leave one’s comfort zone and move on to Act II. And it takes confidence that one possesses an inventory of talents—many unused, perhaps—that can be productively applied on a new frontier. Education and medical science are enabling us to live more years; it’s up to individuals to engineer the quality of those years. Lamm: “Act II can be an exhilarating change. Given the right circumstances and the right attitude, it can bring freshness to life, a new mountain to conquer, vigor, even youthfulness.”

Henry David Thoreau repotted himself, from town to Walden Pond, from teaching and making pencils to living in and observing nature. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

In his new container at Walden, he developed fresh ideas that have influenced generations. Consider some of his most quoted writings:

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

“In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”

“That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”

 “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail….Simplify. Simplify.”

And when Thoreau left Walden Pond to return to town, he was asked: Why are you leaving? His answer was: For the same reason I came.

Or as Maurice Lamm put it at the end of his article: “Who knows? There may be an Act III.”