A Thorn Is a Changed Bud

Botanists separate three kinds of sharp growth that gardeners lump together. A spine is a modified leaf, as in the cactus. A prickle is an outgrowth of the plant's skin and can be snapped off cleanly, which is why the rose, to the surprise of most people, has prickles and not thorns. A true thorn is a modified stem, formed from the same bud that would otherwise have grown into a leafy shoot, as in the citrus tree and the bougainvillea that spills over so many Indian walls. The proverb that a thorn is a changed bud is therefore more than a metaphor. For a true thorn it is plain plant anatomy.

The essayist is interested in what the proverb claims about life. It says that the sharp and painful thing was once soft and full of promise, and that hardship is the form potential takes after it has been bent. Botany offers some support. Field studies of certain African acacias have found that trees which are repeatedly browsed by giraffes and other herbivores can grow longer thorns, so that the injury itself shapes the defence. Damage becomes defence, and defence, if it is wise, becomes direction.

Human lives sometimes follow the same pattern. In 1996 the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun gave the name posttraumatic growth to the reports of people who said that loss, illness or violence had left them with a deeper appreciation of life, closer relationships and a new sense of strength. Viktor Frankl, who survived several concentration camps, wrote that a person with a reason to live can bear almost any hardship, and he built a school of psychotherapy on that belief. In India, Dr B. R. Ambedkar was born into a community treated as untouchable and made to sit apart from his classmates at school, yet he went on to earn doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics and to chair the committee that drafted the Constitution. The bud that society tried to crush became a thorn in the side of the orthodoxy it challenged. The poet Mirza Ghalib, who lost all of his children in infancy and lived through the devastation of Delhi after 1857, wrote verses on grief that readers still quote more than a century and a half later.

Nations show the pattern as well. The Bengal famine of 1943 and the dependence on American wheat shipments under the PL 480 programme in the 1960s left Indian policymakers with a lasting fear of hunger. That fear helped drive the Green Revolution under agricultural scientists and administrators such as M. S. Swaminathan and C. Subramaniam, and by the end of the 1970s the country that had begged for grain had become broadly self sufficient in it. Shortage was the bud and self reliance was the thorn.

Damage becomes defence, and defence, if it is wise, becomes direction.

But the proverb is dangerously flattering. Most thorns hurt the people who brush against them, and most bruised buds simply die. Studies of trauma show that growth is reported by a minority of survivors and often exists alongside continuing distress. To claim that every hardship ennobles is cruel to those whom it broke, and it hands a convenient excuse to those who inflicted it. A society that tells the poor that poverty builds character has found a comfortable reason to leave poverty in place. The objection is serious and the proverb should never be read as praise for suffering.

The evidence against easy optimism is strong. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study, published in 1998 by Vincent Felitti and his colleagues, found that adults who recalled more episodes of abuse, neglect or household dysfunction in childhood had markedly higher risks of heart disease, depression and early death. On average, in other words, early hardship damages. The proverb describes the exceptions, and it is important not to mistake the exceptions for the rule. They are real and instructive, but the buds that become thorns are outnumbered by those that merely wither.

The proverb can survive the objection if it is read more narrowly. It does not say that pain is good. It says something about what a living thing does with what it cannot avoid. A bud does not ask to become a thorn. It becomes one because the alternative, to remain soft in a browsed landscape, is to be eaten. The change is a response and not a reward, and it depends on the bud being alive and resourced enough to respond. Frankl's survivors and Ambedkar's student had something to build on, a reason, a teacher, a book or a patron, and where such support is absent the same pressure produces only damage.

The botanical detail also cuts the other way. A thorn cannot bear leaves. The bud that became a thorn will never become a branch, and the gain in safety is paid for in growth. People who have been hurt often show the same trade. They become guarded and capable, protected from further injury, and also less able to open toward new people and new chances. The plant gains a defence and loses a canopy. The proverb is therefore both a comfort and a warning, since it says that pain can turn a bud into something useful and also that the change is, in most cases, permanent.

Policy has something to learn from the warning. A school system, a family or a workplace that creates hardship in the belief that it builds resilience should remember how much the plant surrenders to become hard. A better design would reduce the browsing and leave the buds a chance to become branches before any thorn is needed. It would also recognise that resilience is not a trait found inside individuals alone, since it depends on the people nearby who removed the animals before it was too late.

Which of these a given life becomes depends on things that no proverb can supply, such as whether the bud was given a season to grow before the pressure arrived, and who was standing nearby when it came. It remains unclear whether a thorn is the bud's own answer to the world or the world's verdict on the bud, and a plant that has already become a thorn cannot say which.