March 15, 2025 Persistence, Patience, and Possibility

Greetings Resilient Friends,

With spring just around the corner, I’ve been thinking about gardening. For many it’s a rewarding hobby to get out in nature and dig in the dirt. Kind of like living… got to get into it and get your hands dirty ;)

Have you ever though of gardening as a metaphor for living?

We do so much to prepare ourselves for life, as we prepare the soil for a garden. We work on our self improvement and try to rid ourselves of negative behaviors… just as we fertilize the soil to make it more productive and pull the weeds. We plant our seeds of dreams and desires and then tend our lives as we do our gardens. Most seasons we are rewarded with successes in life… beautiful blooms, or fresh veggies, depending on what we planted. And for a few years, our harvests are bountiful.

Then, a season brings disaster… a late spring freeze perhaps, that destroys everything we had worked so hard on. And, as in the garden, also in life…a death, a health crisis, or another life changing adversity.

We abandon our garden for the rest of the season, as we abandon much of our life to grieve our loss.

And then another spring… some of us are ready to plant again, some not. We all mourn on our own timelines.

Finally, another spring and we think we are ready to grow our life again. But how? What does it look like? So much has changed. I’m not the gardener I was before. What if the new garden fails? Maybe it’s just my bad luck. Maybe I don’t need a garden… I could just scroll my days away looking at gardens. My garden won’t succeed anyway… why bother?

I’ll think about it tomorrow.

As with all of life, there are one hundred reasons not to begin. But there is only one reason to begin. We are alive… we owe it to ourselves and life.

And so, we put on our gardening gloves one more time :)

We feel unsure of ourselves; no longer feeling like the seasoned pros at gardening…or life. It all feels new with many uncertainties. We tread gingerly now on the earth. We are afraid to be blindsided again by life.

Where to begin?

Begin where you are.

And remember the three P’s to Gardening …and Living

· Persistence

· Patience

· Possibility

Persistence is embracing the journey and focusing on the process. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Just do what you can do today, and tomorrow, and the next, and the next. Plant intentional seeds and care for them.

Patience is the counterbalance to persistence. We do not dig up the seeds every day to see if they are growing. Patience is required to trust the process… have faith in the unknowable.

Possibility is making room in our life and garden for the unexpected. As it is with the garden, so it is with life. Expected and unexpected… sometimes delighting us, sometimes not. Whatever comes… we can trust our wisdom now to respond for our best outcome.

Our success and fulfillment come from our persistence and patience day-by-day.

Take care of each day and then trust your journey. ❤️
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We are all in this together, Susan and Mike

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