Healing Journey

Some Trees Have to Fight for Every Inch.

"Roots do their work out of sight, without applause, without anyone leaning over to ask how they're getting along. Let people grow at their own pace. Let yourself do the same.”

Nobody looks at a tree and asks what it had to endure before it grew tall. We admire the branches, the shade, the way it stands there with an almost unreasonable sort of dignity, even after a storm has torn through its limbs. The roots remain a mystery. So do the years of poor soil, the drought, the slow business of finding water where there hardly seemed to be any. People are much the same, though we seem determined to forget it. We see somebody succeeding and call them lucky. We see somebody struggling and wonder what they're doing wrong. We rarely stop to consider that one person may have been encouraged to reach for the sky while another spent half a lifetime learning it was safe to stand up straight. You cannot measure the courage of a life by the height of its achievements. Not honestly. Not without knowing something about the ground it grew through.

I didn't always understand that. I thought growth would feel more like progress and less like starting over in a different pair of shoes. There have been stretches of my life when I wanted to make sense of everything, to find a neat explanation for the things that hurt and a clear sign that I was moving in the right direction. Life, apparently, has little interest in providing that kind of paperwork. Sometimes you just keep going. You make a mistake, swallow your pride, try to do better. You discover that you can be grateful and disappointed in the same afternoon, that a person can be healing and still have hard days, that choosing to remain kind doesn't mean allowing the world to walk all over you. These aren't lessons I learned once and neatly filed away. I keep learning them. For me, positivity isn't the belief that everything will turn out beautifully; it's the refusal to let disappointment make me ugly inside. There is a difference. A rather important one.

Maybe you're in a season when nothing seems to be happening. You're doing the work, making the changes, trying to believe in a future that hasn't offered much evidence of itself lately. I hope you don't mistake that quiet for failure. Roots do their work out of sight, without applause, without anyone leaning over to ask how they're getting along. And perhaps that's where we need to be a little more generous—with ourselves, certainly, but with other people, too. We don't know what somebody had to unlearn to become gentle, what they had to survive to become steady, or how much effort it takes them simply to show up. So let people grow at their own pace. Let yourself do the same. Keep your sense of humor when you can, your compassion when it's difficult, and your hope even when it feels a little battered around the edges. The ground you grew through may explain your struggles, but it does not get to decide how far your branches can reach.

Have a wonderfully positive day! ☀️

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