You know, I once read about a flower in the Himalayas. The Sikkim Sundari. They say it spends thirty years in the ground—just roots and waiting—before it ever sees the sun. Then it blooms, one time, and it's done.
Thirty years.
Let that sit for a second.
We live in a world that measures time in notifications. Growth is supposed to be a public chart, trending upward. We're told to hustle, to build a personal brand, to ship fast and iterate. Compare. Optimize.
But this flower? It doesn't know any of that. It sits under meters of mountain snow, through monsoons and silent, frozen winters. There's no audience. No progress report. It’s just… becoming. Slowly. Invisibly. The work is all beneath the surface, in the quiet dark where no one can see.
It made me think. We talk about “building in public,” but what about becoming in private? The most real things—the kind that last—often happen where no one is watching. The integrity you build alone. The skill you grind at with no applause. The quiet healing, the stubborn hope you keep on a gray Tuesday for no reason at all.
That’s the root work. It doesn’t look like progress. It feels like patience, which is just a polite word for a kind of aching faith.
Then, one day, the conditions are simply right. Not perfect. Just right. And what emerges isn't a hurried, scrappy thing. It’s the full, unrepeatable expression of everything gathered in those decades of silence. It blooms not for the mountain, but because it is finally, utterly, itself. The bloom is almost a side effect of the long, faithful becoming.
Maybe your life right now is all root. Maybe it’s a season of snow. It’s easy to feel forgotten, like you’re on the wrong timeline while everyone else is in frantic, noisy flower.
But the mountain doesn’t hurry. And the flower doesn’t negotiate with the seasons. It trusts its own rhythm, a rhythm written into its very cells.
Your rhythm is in you, too. However slow, however hidden this chapter feels… it is not empty. You are gathering. You are weathering. You are becoming.
The bloom isn't the point, really. The point is the profound, patient truth of the plant: it knew what it was, even in the deepest dark. And it grew toward that, anyway.
Let them have the hurried blossoms. You have different work. Deeper work. The kind that takes thirty years, and is worth every single one.
