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The sunflowers in my neighborhood and garden are slowly beginning to bloom their yellow petals when delicate seedlings first emerge from the earth in mid-May. The seeds purchased over the winter were sown in late April, and soon Mother Nature’s blooming suns would be dotting the garden, prompting endless smiles (and that’s just from me!).
When buying sunflowers at the grocery store many months before summer arrives, welcoming them into my garden to grow from seed encourages me to wait so that my own sunflowers or shared sunflowers from friends’ gardens can be displayed in home bouquets. The wait makes the arrival all the more delicious and the appreciation when I see the blooms on display – a year of planning, effort and patience made and worth it.
Whatever you desire for your life at this moment, however you wish to change or differentiate it, the journey to realizing it involves the gifts received by the traveler.
Let’s take a look at the three gifts each of us will acquire, each unique to the journey and person on the journey.
1. Scope of refinement and tailoring
Take sunflower seeds, for example. Many are sown every spring, and carefully placed in the ground, covered with soil, and watered until they sprout, not all grow as seedlings. Some will become bird food, others will crowd, and still others will simply not germinate for whatever reason. Time provides space for healthy seeds to find their way to the sun and fully mature.
Similarly, our initial dreams, while we have time to move forward slowly, will not proceed in a straight line. We will face setbacks, we will experience doubt, we will have experiences that will give us more information to refine our direction and approach as well as what we want. All this is for our benefit. The time between when we set sail in earnest and when we finally arrive at our desired port ensures that we actually arrive at the place where we want to land. Somewhere that leads us to experience what #2’s gift is.
2. A standing ovation
While the journey has been long, and it’s often long because what we’ve created, chosen to accomplish, etc. involves a multitude of details, components, steps, once we arrive, it’s because we’ve stayed the course. We chose to find out. What would have been much easier was to turn back, stop or abandon the road we set ourselves on. But no, we believed something in us that wouldn’t let us dismiss this path. Yes, we adjusted as we went, but we never stopped trekking our chosen endeavors.
Through all these combinations, we have grown. We are forever transformed. Which brings us to gift #3. . .
3. Awareness of how we have transformed
When something is rolling by us or in front of us, a speeding car, a streak of lightning, or a batted ball, what we see is the ‘thing’ moving faster; However, it is impossible to make out the details of that object without slow-motion detection. As it relates to our journey, when it takes time, we are given time to appreciate what we have learned, how we have evolved along the way, because we needed to make progress. And because we know the journey has been transformative, we feel grateful that it took time.
We didn’t know how the journey would change us or what it would give us, but it would give us gifts.
As we embark on our new journey, or when we find ourselves in the middle of the journey wondering whether to continue, remembering that we are going to be gifted with the priceless gift of sticking with it, tweaking and polishing, these are the carrots we need to remind ourselves of so often that we believe we are on the journey where we will arrive.
With each new journey we choose to embark on, remembering our past journeys and how we have evolved as a result of their unfolding, assuring that each journey will be unique in its own right, we, the voyager, have the ability to endure the temporary tussle and drift with the necessary current, until we find ourselves floating in calm waters. Persistence in times of uncertainty, in which there is certainty, becomes easier with the completion of each journey. This doesn’t mean the next journey will be easy, but instead of anxiously locking ourselves into ongoing excitement until we arrive, we feel more relaxed as we travel and thus better able to enjoy each day along the way. This is no way to travel, and makes it impossible to enjoy what we discover and learn about the world and ourselves along the way. And it often slows our progress and limits the opportunities available to us as we journey.
So today, if you find yourself wondering if it will ever be complete, the journey you’ve started, or the project you’re in the middle of, or whether you should even start, remember that there’s a bundle of gifts waiting to be handed to you, and, upon reflection, perhaps many already are – not just the end result when you finally arrive, but what you’ll be able to express. By saying yes to the beginning and continuation of the journey, you give yourself that gift, until you arrive, whenever that may be. But if you start today it will be much faster.
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