77: You Can Choose the Soil

For much of life, we do not get to choose the soil in which we grow.

We are like young plants.

We are placed somewhere, and we have to survive.

If the soil is poor, we send our roots farther.

If there are rocks, we grow around them.

If sunlight is limited, we stretch toward whatever light we can find.

We adapt.

This is especially true during the building years of life.

We need education.

We need work.

We need income.

We need opportunities.

We have people who depend on us.

Sometimes we remain in difficult environments not because they are ideal, but because they provide something we need.

And so we develop an important question:

How can I survive and grow in this soil?

That question can make us remarkably strong.

We learn.

We work harder.

We become useful.

We adapt to different people and cultures.

We develop skills that allow us to survive conditions we once thought impossible.

There is dignity in this kind of persistence.

But perhaps there comes another season.

Over many years, we accumulate something.

Experience.

Skills.

Relationships.

Financial foundation.

Wisdom.

Other interests and sources of meaning.

Gradually, without realizing it, something fundamental changes.

We are no longer only the plant.

We have become the gardener.

And the gardener can ask a different question.

Not:

How do I survive this soil?

But:

Is this where I want to keep growing?

That is a very different question.

And perhaps that is one of the deepest forms of freedom.

Freedom does not mean finding a life without difficulty.

Every meaningful garden has difficult seasons.

There will be poor weather.

There will be weeds.

There will be plants that fail.

There will be work we do not enjoy.

Freedom does not mean constantly moving whenever something becomes uncomfortable.

It means something deeper.

I no longer need to remain in soil that repeatedly requires me to become less myself simply because I am capable of surviving there.

For years, we may take pride in our ability to tolerate difficult environments.

I can handle this.

I can adapt.

I can work harder.

I can survive.

And perhaps we can.

But eventually another question becomes more important:

Just because I can survive here, why must I spend my remaining life here?

The answer may once have been necessity.

Perhaps now it is not.

This realization changes how we look at the larger garden.

There may be other soil around us.

Work that feels meaningful in a different way.

Some areas may already contain small plants we barely noticed because all our attention was directed toward surviving in one difficult field.

We do not need to immediately abandon the old garden.

Nor do we need to find perfect soil somewhere else.

Perhaps we simply begin paying attention.

Where do I feel alive?

Where can I be fully myself?

Where does my energy naturally want to go?

Where can what I have learned become useful without consuming who I am?

For much of life, strength may mean learning how to grow wherever we are planted.

But perhaps mature freedom brings another possibility.

We can appreciate the roots that made us strong.

We can be grateful for difficult soil that taught us how to survive.

And then, one day, we can look across the wider landscape and realize:

I am no longer only the plant.

I am the gardener now.

And I can choose where to plant the life I still have to give.