The Heart of Endurance

Tag: nature

  • Life as a soil

    For much of life, we pay attention to what is growing above the ground.

    Our career.

    Our accomplishments.

    Our skills.

    Our income.

    Our reputation.

    The projects we complete and the things we create.

    We look at the size of the tree and ask:

    Is it growing fast enough?

    Is it producing enough fruit?

    Could it become even larger?

    This is natural during the building years of life. We need to cultivate abilities, create financial security, support our families, and contribute to the world.

    But recently I have begun thinking about life differently.

    Perhaps the most important part of the garden is not the largest tree.

    It is the soil.

    The soil is what makes growth possible.

    What is the soil of a human life?

    For me, it includes faith and my relationship with God.

    Family relationships that genuinely grow together.

    Solitude.

    Rest.

    Physical and emotional health.

    Inner character and values.

    These things may not be our most visible accomplishments. They rarely appear on a résumé. Yet everything else grows from them.

    For much of our achievement-oriented lives, however, we often do exactly the opposite of what a good gardener would do.

    We sacrifice sleep for work.

    We replace solitude with meetings.

    We give family time to professional opportunities.

    We sacrifice health for productivity.

    In other words:

    We deplete the soil to make one plant grow faster.

    And it often works.

    The professional tree becomes larger.

    Its branches spread.

    It produces impressive fruit.

    People admire it.

    But eventually we may discover that the soil underneath has become exhausted.

    Perhaps the second half of life asks us to reverse the priority.

    Take care of the soil first.

    Then look around the garden.

    There may already be mature trees.

    Professional knowledge.

    Skills developed over decades.

    Physical capabilities.

    Wisdom gained through experience.

    These trees do not need to be cut down simply because they are no longer growing rapidly.

    Let them stand.

    They may continue producing fruit and providing shade for others without requiring constant attention.

    Then there are smaller plants and flowers.

    Friendships.

    Interests.

    Travel.

    Conversations.

    Unexpected opportunities.

    Beautiful experiences.

    Some may remain for decades.

    Others may bloom for only one season.

    That does not make them less valuable.

    Perhaps friendship is especially like this.

    Receive friendship when it grows.

    Cultivate it when it is alive.

    Appreciate its fruit.

    But do not require every friendship to remain unchanged forever.

    A flower does not need to become a permanent tree in order to have been beautiful.

    And some ground should remain empty.

    We do not need to plant every available space.

    Solitude.

    Rest.

    Uncertainty.

    Things not yet discovered.

    These empty places are not wasted land.

    They allow the garden to breathe.

    Perhaps this is what an integrated life looks like.

    Care for the soil.

    Let the mature trees stand.

    Plant new seeds.

    Enjoy the flowers while they bloom.

    Don’t force every plant to become permanent.

    Leave some ground empty.

    Notice what grows.

    For years, I thought the gardener’s responsibility was to produce the biggest and most fruitful tree possible.

    Now I am beginning to understand something different.

    A gardener’s first responsibility is not to the biggest tree.

    It is to the soil from which the whole garden lives.

    Perhaps when the soil is rich, we do not need to control everything that grows from it.

    We can cultivate what needs our care, receive what appears unexpectedly, and simply enjoy walking through the garden while it is here.

  • 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.

  • 74: The Tree Is Not the Entire Garden

    For much of my life, I cultivated one field.

    I planted carefully.

    I worked the soil.

    I watered consistently.

    I removed weeds.

    When the weather became difficult, I protected what I had planted.

    When growth was slow, I worked harder.

    Gradually, one tree became larger.

    Its roots grew deeper. Its branches spread. It began producing fruit.

    For many years, much of my attention was focused on that tree.

    How can I make it stronger?

    How can I help it grow?

    How can I produce more fruit?

    This is how many of us build the first half of life.

    The tree may be a career, a business, a profession, or another major pursuit. We invest enormous amounts of time and energy into it.

    There is nothing wrong with this.

    A large tree does not grow accidentally.

    It requires years of discipline, patience, failure, learning, and persistence.

    But eventually, something changes.

    The tree becomes mature.

    Perhaps it no longer needs constant attention.

    Perhaps circumstances make further growth difficult.

    Or perhaps we simply begin noticing something that was there all along:

    The tree is not the entire garden.

    There is land beyond it.

    For years, the large tree may have occupied so much of our attention that we barely noticed the surrounding space.

    But when we finally step away from its shade, we discover other possibilities.

    Perhaps these were always present as small plants or unopened seeds.

    Now there is room to notice them.

    Our first instinct may be to approach the new garden exactly as we approached the old tree.

    Plant quickly.

    Work harder.

    Measure growth.

    Increase productivity.

    Turn every seed into another project.

    But perhaps the second half of life asks for a different kind of gardening.

    Not every plant needs to grow faster.

    Not every flower needs to produce fruit.

    Not every empty piece of land needs to be planted.

    Some plants need water.

    Some need pruning.

    Some need to be left alone.

    Some may bloom beautifully for one season and disappear.

    And some seeds may become trees we will never live long enough to see fully mature.

    The gardener’s task is not to force everything to grow.

    It is to pay attention.

    To prepare the soil.

    To notice what is emerging.

    To respond when care is needed.

    And sometimes simply to sit in the garden and enjoy what is already there.

    Perhaps this is the transition from expansion to integration.

    Expansion asks:

    How can I make this tree bigger?

    Integration asks:

    What else is growing in this garden?

    The old tree does not need to be cut down.

    It deserves gratitude.

    Its roots contain decades of experience. Its branches may still provide shade. Its fruit may continue helping others. Everything learned while cultivating it—patience, judgment, resilience, discipline—can now be carried into the wider garden.

    It simply no longer needs to be the garden.

    Perhaps that is one of the freedoms of the second half of life.

    We stop trying to force more growth from the one tree that has defined us.

    We begin walking around the land.

    We plant a few seeds.

    We leave some spaces empty.

    We watch.

    We receive.

    And gradually, we discover that a rich life was never meant to contain only one magnificent tree.

    Perhaps the deepest joy is not producing the largest tree at all.

    Perhaps it is finally learning how to live inside the whole garden.

  • 72: Birds swimming with me

    This morning, I went to the beach with my wife.

    I was there for open-water swim training. From the shore, a yellow buoy marked the area where I was swimming. My wife stayed on land and took pictures while I trained.

    Later, she showed me one photograph.

    The lake filled almost the entire frame.

    Far away, I was barely visible—a tiny yellow point beside the buoy.

    Closer to the camera, two birds were quietly floating on the water.

    While I had been swimming, they had been swimming too.

    It was such a simple scene.

    Water.

    Wind.

    Birds.

    My wife on the shore.

    My body moving through the lake.

    Nothing extraordinary happened.

    Yet somehow the photograph felt deeply beautiful.

    Recently, I have been thinking about emotions as existing inside a room.

    When sadness, anger, disappointment, or grief becomes strong, it can occupy almost the entire room. We hear it everywhere. We analyze it. We argue with it. We try to remove it.

    But perhaps emotional healing does not always require the painful feeling to disappear.

    Perhaps we can simply make the room larger.

    The painful emotion no longer needs to leave. It simply becomes one part of something much larger.

    Looking at my wife’s photograph, I realized that perhaps the same principle could be described another way:

    Make the frame larger.

    When the frame is small, one painful event can fill the entire picture.

    But when the frame becomes wider, we begin noticing what else has been there all along.

    That morning, my training plan had numbers.

    Distance.

    Time.

    Pace.

    Heart rate.

    Those measurements are useful. They help me prepare and improve.

    But none of them could record the most meaningful part of the morning:

    I was swimming in the lake while my wife watched from shore, and birds quietly floated beside me.

    There is no metric for that.

    And yet years from now, I may remember the photograph more clearly than my swimming pace.

    Perhaps this is part of learning a different way of living.

    We spend much of life learning to recognize large signals: achievement, success, failure, recognition, problems.

    But ordinary life speaks much more quietly.

    A bird beside us.

    Trees moving in the wind.

    Someone we love waiting on the shore.

    A healthy body still able to move.

    A moment when nothing needs to be accomplished except being there.

    These things were probably always around us.

    The question is whether we had enough inner space to notice them.

    Pain can narrow our vision.

    But healing may gradually widen it again.

    Not by denying what hurts.

    Not by forcing gratitude to replace grief.

    But by allowing both to exist inside a larger landscape.

    Something painful may still be present.

    And something beautiful may be happening at exactly the same time.

    Perhaps we do not always need to remove what hurts.

    Sometimes we simply need to make the room larger.

    Make the landscape wider.

    Make the frame bigger.

    And then look again.

    We may discover that the painful thing is still there—but it is no longer the whole picture.

  • 70: The Geese Knew Where to Go

    This morning, I saw a group of geese walking across an open space.

    They were simply walking.

    Some were ahead.

    Some were behind.

    There was no perfect formation. No apparent urgency. They seemed to stop when they wanted to stop and move when they wanted to move.

    Watching them, a thought came to me.

    They do not care about politics.

    They do not care about recognition.

    They do not wonder whether someone approves of the direction they are going.

    They simply go where they need to go, at their own pace.

    Of course, human life is much more complicated.

    We have responsibilities.

    We have families.

    We work inside organizations.

    We need money.

    We make commitments to other people.

    We cannot simply walk away every time something becomes uncomfortable.

    But perhaps that is exactly why this simple scene stayed with me.

    For much of my life, I wanted to know where I was going.

    I chose a destination, created a plan, and concentrated my energy on getting there.

    That way of living served me well.

    But perhaps there are seasons when we do not need to know the entire destination.

    Perhaps we only need to know the direction of the next few steps.

    What gives me peace?

    What quietly gives me energy?

    Where do I feel most like myself?

    Which relationships do I want to protect?

    What am I curious about?

    What is my body telling me?

    Where is unnecessary noise consuming energy that could be used somewhere more meaningful?

    These questions do not always give us a five-year plan.

    Sometimes they simply point toward the next few feet.

    And perhaps that is enough.

    The geese also seemed completely unconcerned about pace.

    Some walked faster.

    Some slowly.

    Occasionally the distance between them became larger.

    Yet they continued moving.

    I realized how much of human life is spent comparing pace.

    Am I progressing quickly enough?

    Am I behind someone else?

    Should I have accomplished more by now?

    Even during transitions, we can create another competition: How quickly can I discover my next purpose?

    But perhaps there is no prize for crossing a bridge quickly.

    Sometimes we need to walk.

    Sometimes we need to stop.

    Sometimes we need to sit quietly and look around.

    And sometimes we may simply follow a signal without knowing exactly where it leads.

    There was one more thing I noticed.

    The geese were moving individually, but they were not alone.

    They traveled together without appearing to require everyone to move in exactly the same way.

    Perhaps that is another picture of a good life.

    We can have our own direction and our own pace while still walking beside people we love.

    We do not need identical paths to share part of the journey.

    Eventually, the geese continued on, and I continued with my morning.

    They probably had no idea that they had taught me anything.

    But perhaps that is what happens when we become quiet enough to notice.

    Ordinary moments begin to speak.

    And the message I heard that morning was simple:

    You do not need to know the entire path.

    Listen for the next direction.

    Move at your own pace.

    And do not spend too much energy worrying about who is watching.

    Sometimes the next step is enough.

  • 21: God’s pace

    On the way back from the gym, I saw the sunrise.

    This was not the first time.

    I have seen the same morning sky many times. Same road. Same direction. Same sun rising.

    But for many years, I did not truly see it.

    In the busy morning, I usually lowered the sun visor and started thinking about the day.

    What do I need to do?

    What is waiting at work?

    What problem must be solved?

    What is next?

    The sunrise was there.

    But my mind was somewhere else.

    ⸻

    Recently, something has changed.

    The same morning feels different.

    The sky is no longer just brightness in front of my eyes.

    I can see the fine changes in color.

    Soft transitions.

    Light spreading slowly.

    A quiet movement from darkness to morning.

    Nothing dramatic happens all at once.

    But everything changes.

    ⸻

    The sun rises slowly.

    But it never stops.

    It looks gentle.

    But its power is unbelievable.

    No noise.

    No hurry.

    No need to prove anything.

    It simply rises.

    And the world responds.

    ⸻

    Watching it, I felt something I can only describe as God’s pace.

    Not the pace of human urgency.

    Not the pace of meetings, deadlines, schedules, or social pressure.

    God’s pace feels different.

    Slow to my eyes.

    But never late.

    Steady.

    Quiet.

    Certain.

    ⸻

    This image stayed with me.

    For much of my life, I thought progress required pressure.

    I believed movement had to feel urgent.

    If I was not pushing, maybe I was falling behind.

    But the sunrise teaches something else.

    Power does not always rush.

    Real movement can be quiet.

    The sun does not force the morning.

    It becomes morning by rising steadily.

    ⸻

    I think life may work this way more often than I realized.

    Growth does not always announce itself.

    Healing does not always feel dramatic.

    Peace does not arrive loudly.

    Sometimes change happens like sunrise.

    Gradually.

    Almost invisibly.

    Then suddenly, the whole landscape is different.

    ⸻

    The morning itself had not changed.

    The sky had been doing this for years.

    What changed was my ability to receive it.

    My mind was no longer completely occupied by the next task.

    There was enough quiet inside to notice what had always been there.

    ⸻

    This is one of the gifts of my current stage of life.

    I am learning to see what I used to pass by.

    A sunrise.

    A color in the sky.

    A quiet breath.

    A moment of gratitude.

    These are not small things.

    They are invitations.

    ⸻

    The sunrise had always been there.

    Only my mind was too busy to receive it.

    ⸻

    God’s pace is slow to my eyes,

    but never late.

    ⸻

    The sun does not rush to prove its power.

    It simply rises,

    and the world changes.

  • 7: When the Season Changes

    For many years, my life felt like summer.

    Active.

    Bright.

    Productive.

    Expanding.

    There was growth everywhere. Work, training, research, responsibility, ambition. I was building outward. I was using energy to create, achieve, and move forward.

    Summer was necessary.

    It gave me strength.

    It built discipline.

    It created structure.

    It helped me survive and grow.

    But no season lasts forever.

    ⸻

    Now I feel fall arriving.

    Fall is beautiful, but it carries sadness.

    Leaves change color before they fall. Something is being released. The tree does not fail when leaves drop. It simply knows what can no longer be carried into the next season.

    I feel something similar inside myself.

    I am cutting off unnecessary leaves.

    Old expectations.

    Unneeded meetings.

    Social pressure.

    The need to prove.

    The desire for recognition.

    The habit of fighting every criticism.

    Some of these leaves were useful in earlier seasons. They gathered energy. They helped me grow.

    But now they feel heavy.

    Letting them go makes me lighter.

    ⸻

    At first, this lightness can feel like loss.

    Less involvement.

    Less social participation.

    Less ambition for certain things.

    Less desire to chase what once seemed important.

    From the outside, it may look like decline.

    But internally, it feels different.

    It feels like preparation.

    ⸻

    A tree in fall is not giving up.

    It is becoming ready for winter.

    Winter looks quiet from the outside. There is less visible growth. Less movement. Less activity.

    But life has not disappeared.

    It has moved inward.

    The roots remain alive.

    Energy is conserved.

    Structure is protected.

    Strength becomes hidden.

    ⸻

    Perhaps this is also true in life.

    In one season, growth must be visible.

    In another season, growth becomes internal.

    Earlier, I grew through expansion.

    Now, I grow through release.

    Earlier, discipline helped me climb.

    Now, discipline helps me let go of what no longer belongs.

    ⸻

    This change is not always easy.

    There is grief in releasing what once mattered.

    But there is also peace.

    Because with fewer leaves to carry, I can feel the trunk more clearly.

    The core remains.

    These are not falling away.

    They are becoming more visible.

    ⸻

    I am learning that life stage change is not simply losing something.

    It is revealing what must remain.

    ⸻

    Fall made me sad because summer had been real.

    But winter does not mean life is gone.

    It means life has moved inward.

    ⸻

    I spent many years growing in the sun.

    Now I am learning how to stay warm in the quiet.