Toward Blooming

Patience and perspective are key to giving something, including ourselves, time to bloom. “Long years of gathering strength”—that’s a different way to think about ease. When I think of something being easy, its being immediate, or at least quick, is implied.

Blooming takes time. Anna and Ava are 21 and 18 years into a journey that I am 51 years into. The journey is of being alive, of each of us living our lives until we aren’t. We tend to look at things as being positive—graduation, relationships, new job, new car—or negative, say, the loss of any of those things. But it might be more helpful to look at everything that happens to us as moving us closer toward becoming who we might be.

What does blooming look like in a person? Who are we to become? There are so many answers to that question. It’s fair to say that in some cases, the answer may change, or the first answer we come up with may not be the final answer.

This summer, we will have a small group study of David Brooks’s book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. Brooks talks about the kinds of conversations we have.

“All conversations are either humanizing or dehumanizing, and problem-centered conversations tend to be impersonal and dehumanizing,” he writes. “The better community-building conversations focus on possibilities, not problems. They are questions such as, what crossroads do we stand at right now? What can we build together? How can we improve our lives together? What talents do we have here that haven’t been fully expressed?”

Who we become is greatly impacted by who we are around, who we engage with, who we give our time and energy to. We won’t bloom alone. We need each other. In his focus on two mountains in our lives, Brooks looks at people “who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light.”

For our metaphor, let’s say people who are blooming. These are people Brooks says have moved past the