What Has Been Growing in You?
We grow things without always realizing it. What might be taking shape while you're busy living your life?
Dear friend,
I am writing this via voice memo to myself while standing on my vibration plate. There is a protein shake beside me, laundry waiting to be folded at my feet, and somewhere between client sessions and the pharmacy closing, I need to pick up a prescription I have been meaning to collect for ten days.
The mail hasn't been picked up for a week. There’s still a dusting of cardamom marking the kitchen counter from the spice I sprinkle over my coffee every morning. Dust is plotting to take over my loft.
And I cannot get these words out of my head.
So I'm giving them to you.
This is my life today. Yours will have its own particulars.
Maybe work is demanding more than you have to give. Multiple someones need something from you. Money is tight. Someone you love needs care. Perhaps things are moving along reasonably well and you're simply trying to keep them this way. Or maybe getting out of bed took everything you had today.
Somewhere inside all of it, there you are.
I've been thinking about how easily conversations about growth and healing can sound indulgent when the dishes are still in the sink, the bills are staring at us, the schedule is incomprehensible, or the family feels fractured. Who has time to contemplate what is taking root when we're just trying to get through Tuesday?
Tuesday, it turns out, is precisely where things take root.
The hand that reaches for the screen every time the room becomes quiet is growing something. So are the feet that find the sidewalk or trail every morning.
Something grows in the way we speak to ourselves, in the breath we’ve begun taking before answering someone, and in the extra few seconds we let ourselves receive something good.
Something is always being practiced.
Some of what we practice is deliberate. Other things begin taking shape while we’re busy living—answering emails, caring for people, working, worrying, recovering, paying bills, falling in love, belly-laughing, making love, grieving, or simply getting ourselves through another day. Over time, these small repetitions become part of how we experience our lives. And this has me wondering:
What has been growing in me while I've been busy living?
I don’t always know. Sometimes I can name it. Other times, I feel it long before I can understand what it is.
A compliment lands and heat rises into my cheeks. I open an email and feel my stomach tighten before I’ve finished the first sentence. A possibility enters the conversation and my shoulders drop.
Some things reach us before we have words for them.
I hear myself say yes while something inside me pulls away. A no leaves my mouth and suddenly there is more room in my lungs. Tears reach my eyes halfway through a sentence I thought I could say without crying.
Something has already happened.
This is contact.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE STAY?
Contact arrives before the words of understanding. It is the moment something in your life reaches something in you.
We talk a great deal about self-awareness in our culture. I value it deeply. Understanding our patterns and histories can give language to experiences we've carried for years. Yet there is another experience available even closer to the bone.
Can I stay with what just happened?
Long enough to feel the heat in my cheeks. Long enough to notice my breathing has changed. Or long enough to hear the sentence forming underneath the one I was preparing to say.
Staying gives contact somewhere to go. And somewhere in these few seconds, what I am feeling and what I know begin to find each other.
Oh. There I am.
MY HANDS KNEW BEFORE I HAD WORDS
When I was old enough to hold a stapler, one of my jobs in my father's business was assembling statements. A printed statement on top. Carbon paper in the middle. A blank sheet underneath.
I was persistent about keeping my pile full.
My father was very good at his work. He was generous with it, quick to serve, and much slower to ask people to pay him. The pile of completed invoices rarely kept pace with my pile of blank statements.
Meanwhile, my mother carried the numbers. I watched her wonder when the invoices would go out, when the money would arrive, and how everything would be paid.
I was a little girl putting pieces of paper together. I was also learning something.
My hands knew the ritual long before I had language for what it meant.
Decades later, I have plenty of self-awareness about my relationship with money. I can trace the patterns. I understand how those years shaped my relationship with work and worth, asking and receiving, financial safety and financial freedom.
This understanding matters. Then a medical bill arrives that I wasn’t expecting and something old in me tightens. My mind starts moving quickly through numbers, possibilities, what can wait, and what needs to happen next.
There she is—the little girl with the carbon paper.
Self-awareness helps me understand where I have been. Contact lets me recognize where I am. I can feel her without asking her to decide what happens next. My lived experience has shaped me, and it belongs to me. I can honor what it has taught me while paying attention to what I am growing from here. This is where awareness becomes something I can actually live.
HARVEST STARTS CLOSE TO THE GROUND
There are things I have been tending this year that I cannot show you yet. I’ve been writing, tending my body, cultivating my business, and asking different questions about the life I want to build. From the outside, some of these things may look remarkably similar to the way they looked when this year began. From inside of them, I can feel movement.
Some may become visible soon and other things need another season. A few may become something entirely different from what I imagined. For now, I notice the evidence closer to the ground: a question I ask differently, a place where my breath steadies, something I’m finally willing to write, a decision slowly taking shape, an old story that can move through me without determining where I go next.
And lately, I've been wondering:
What if the thing we've been waiting to harvest isn’t the thing that has actually been growing?
We may be waiting for the career to evolve, the relationship to change, the body to heal, or the thing we have been tending to finally become visible.
Meanwhile, something else may have taken root: the capacity to stay with uncertainty, a truth we can finally speak, a different relationship with our body, the recognition that something we have been reaching toward no longer feels like ours.
There are harvests we cannot photograph, friend.
Some of what we find may be ready for daylight, while something else needs another season. We may also recognize something we no longer want to keep growing. Perhaps the first harvest is simply this:
I can recognize what is here.
My prescription still needs to be picked up. The laundry remains unfolded. The mail still needs collecting. Making contact with myself hasn’t completed anything on today’s list. It has done something far more useful.
It has changed the way I am here to meet it.
I can recognize what is tightening before it determines my next move. I can feel what is alive before I explain it away. I can notice what I have been growing and decide what I want to keep tending.
Contact puts me back inside my own life with more of myself available to actually live it rather than simply manage it.
I think about the carbon ink that marked my fingertips all those years ago as I reach for the laundry still waiting at my feet. My hands are still tending a life. I know more about what I am growing now.
I hope these words help you get a little closer to what is growing in yours too.
From my heart to yours,
Practice Postscript
Where the letter stops being read and starts being lived.
Give yourself 60 seconds somewhere inside the life you are already living. While the coffee brews. Sitting in your parked car. Before the next meeting begins.
Bring one thing close.
Something happening today. A conversation you keep returning to in your mind. A decision taking shape. Something you want. Something you are avoiding.
Choose what arrives first. For a few seconds, leave the meaning alone.
What happens in you when you bring this close?
Notice your first response. Your breath changes. Something tightens or softens. A sentence arrives. You feel yourself move toward it or pull away.
Stay for one more breath. Then ask:
What do I recognize from here?
You may know immediately. You may recognize something unfinished, inconvenient, tender, or difficult to name.
Let what you feel and what you know begin to find each other.
This is enough.
Make contact. Stay. Recognize.
Then return to your day. Take the meeting. Fold the laundry. Make dinner. Pick up the prescription.
Take yourself with you.
A place to practice
There are places in our lives we cannot see clearly while we’re standing inside them.
Another person can hear the sentence we almost skipped. Notice when the energy changes before we have words for it. Stay when our eyes fill without needing the tears to stop.
This is part of what becomes possible at The Courage Practice: a place to recognize the pattern, practice the conversation, sit beside the questions, or let a decision take shape while another human being stays alongside you instead of rushing you.
A place where you can make contact with yourself while another person stays in contact with you.
They aren’t there to author what they see. The choices and answers remain yours. You have somewhere to practice finding them.
If something in your life is asking for this kind of attention, there is a place for you here.
