When Change Isn’t Yet Visible

Dear Friends,

There is an area at the front of our house that is brimming with white daisies and colourful foxgloves that shine like purple and pink popsicles in the midst of the angelic blooms. Every time I drive in and out of our home just looking at the flowers flowing in the breeze makes me smile.

This is in stark contrast to how I was feeling about this area six months ago. Six months ago, in the depths of winter, I had asked my husband to strim the area and to mow over what looked like a horticultural mess. It looked like dead weeds had just taken over what my son and I had so lovingly planted two summers ago.

That weekend in the heat, he and I got our spades and our trowels and planted seeds, perennials, and hope for a scene that would delight not just us but the bees and bunnies who would emerge from a long winter and for everyone who would take their walks in our neighbourhood. Yet, in the winter, all I could see and think about was the mess at the front of our house. I was embarrassed. I thought this space would look better after all the work we had done. Maybe not full-on flowers in the winter, but at least something to show for our efforts. I wanted to fix it immediately. I wanted it to look neat. Yet despite my protestations, my husband told me to just wait.

If you know me, you’ll know this isn’t a piece about gardening. This is about the part of our growth that is often not seen or acknowledged when we plant the seeds of change in our own lives. It is also the part that we try to actively avoid.

When the initial energy of knowing what we want is still present, it all feels clear. We can see it even before we start doing anything. We can map the steps we need to take. We can act, implementing those steps one by one. But when we are waiting for the results to emerge, that energy starts to wane. And when that waiting stretches longer than expected, we start to question everything. We start to re-evaluate what was once so clear. That’s when all the fear, doubt, and insecurities kick in. Like clockwork.

What once felt like growth starts to feel like failure. What once felt intentional starts to feel like judgment and self-criticism.

This is what I like to call the ‘messy middle’—the space we would prefer to skip over, not talk about, and not recognise for what it truly is. It’s the space we want to fill immediately so that we don’t feel the discomfort of not knowing. We will fill it by grasping at straws, making decisions out of fear and scarcity, and drowning out that initial clarity that was based on trusting ourselves. You see, this space isn’t proof that nothing is happening or that we have failed. It is simply the part where growth and change aren’t visible. Yet.

The most unhelpful part of this point in this journey is when we start to interfere with what we planted in the first place, going against what we knew to be so right for us.

In gardens. At work. In relationships. In anything that requires time, we tend to trust beginnings because they are full of momentum, and we trust endings because they give us clarity. But we struggle to trust the middle, where nothing is resolved, and nothing is yet proven. So we intervene. We prune too early. We look over the work we have done and start to over-analyse and find mistakes where there aren’t any. We change direction too quickly. We assume that space or silence means failure or that something is wrong--that we’re off track. And often, what is actually growing gets cut down before it even has had the chance to show itself.

What my front yard makes me see is not just how wrong I was about the flowers during that time of the 'messy middle'. Looking back, I can see how uncomfortable I was with not knowing. It’s how quickly I decided I knew the outcome, and how certain I was about it. How quickly I wanted to fill that space because I couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of waiting without visible results.

I wanted certainty. I wanted evidence. I wanted reassurance that something was happening.

In Bending Reality, Victoria Song describes this as contraction: the way our nervous system narrows our focus when faced with uncertainty and pushes us towards certainty, even when certainty isn't available--even when that certainty may not even be accurate.

Standing in front of those flowers now, I can see just how quickly I mistook what I could see for the whole story.

For months, all I saw was a patch of dead weeds. Today, that patch of land, filled with daisies and foxgloves, is the first thing I look at when I leave and return to the house. And it makes me so happy I didn’t act on what I thought I knew. I accepted what my husband suggested to wait. He was right---but I'm not going to tell him that.

Monita xo