Bloom Where You Land
When my husband and I bought our first home in LA in the 90’s, the people we bought it from were moving to Hawaii, so they left all of their plants for us. Among some unusual cactus and a variety of other plants there was a succulent known as Hens and Chicks (in the Sempervivum family). I didn’t know anything about succulents, except that they didn’t need a lot of water. My kind of plant--low maintenance.
When we moved to Orange County in 1999, we hauled all of our plants with us. I found a nice place on the corner of our back patio for the Hens and Chicks. Over the years, it jumped out of the pot and started spreading into our flower bed. And then it popped up on the side of the house.
I soon discovered that you can literally pinch off a bud and jab it into the ground and it will grow. It finds a way to adapt wherever you put it. It sprouts roots and adapts. It doesn’t really care how much sun it gets or if you forget to water it, it seems to make do no matter where it lands. I even glue them to the tops of pumpkins in the fall and it thrives for months without water or soil until the pumpkin is tossed and I take the plants and put them back in the ground to grow until I snip them off again the next fall. There are 40 different varieties of succulents and they all adapt and grow a bit differently, but they all have the same quality, resiliency.
Moving to south Orange County was rough for me, I was nine months pregnant and didn’t know a sole in my new community but my coworkers. That should have been an easy move since it was just down the freeway, but it was hard. We had to adapt to a much different environment than we had come from in bustling Los Angeles. My husband met his golf buddies and I made friends with other new moms relatively quickly, but it took some work.
When we think about transferees, they are often like succulents. No matter where we plant them, they figure out how to adapt and thrive. Some have a harder go of it than others, but they usually eventually end up adapting and thriving in their new life, but it’s not without its challenges.
Think about how hard it is when we aren’t just moving down the freeway. What about those families that move from another country and don’t speak English well? It’s hard to even imagine how adapting to the American way must be, but they do it. The cultural differences can be staggering. Just because we love where we live doesn’t mean everyone will. That’s why our help during the relocation is so important. Their relocation consultant or their real estate agent may the first friendly, helpful voice they have in their new city.
We have to take great care to never trivialize the traumatic nature of relocation on a family. And of course, COVID has compounded the challenges of a relocation exponentially. If it was hard to make friends and adapt before in a new community, now it’s almost impossible. Corporations, relocation companies and brokers need to do whatever we can to identify what transferees are going through and provide the appropriate resources. Just because we have a sunny corner on the patio, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are going to thrive without some help. Unless you’re a succulent.
“Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.” ~ Jamais Cascio, Author and Futurist
