Nothing happens until one day something happens. So you keep planting — seed after seed — even when the ground gives you nothing back.
Trying and trying at something you feel you rightfully deserve is, at first, almost intoxicating. It's liberating. Exciting, even. It fuels your sense of purpose, gives you a reason to get up, hands you a direction when you didn't have one. For a while, the wanting itself feels like enough. The effort feels like proof that you're headed somewhere.
But nobody tells you what happens when that fire slowly fades. When the sheer force of your own determination — the thing that carried you for months, for years — quietly fizzles out and you're left standing in the same spot, holding the same hope, except now it's heavier. You try the thing from every angle you can think of. And the angles go nowhere. Not a dramatic nowhere. Just a flat, unremarkable, repeating nowhere.
There's a saying that goes: nothing happens until one day something happens. For years, you can see no end in sight. But you keep planting seeds — seed after seed after seed.
And that's the part that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it. There's no physical evidence of growth. No visible bend in the soil. You've basically walked straight into the tall brick wall of life, and you have nothing — no result, no proof, no neat little marker — to show for all the work you've put in.
The wall is silent. That's what makes it so disorienting. It doesn't taunt you, doesn't explain itself, doesn't give you a timeline. It just stands there, exactly as tall and exactly as brick as it was the last hundred times you pushed against it. And somewhere in that silence, it's easy to start believing the absence of evidence means the absence of progress. That nothing growing where you can see it means nothing is growing at all.
I think the real test isn't the trying itself — trying is almost easy when the fire's still lit. The real test is what you do once the fire dims and you have to keep planting anyway, on faith alone, with no evidence and no guarantee, just the quiet stubborn decision to put one more seed in the ground.
I don't know exactly which seed it will be. I don't know if it's the next one, or the hundredth one after that. I just know that the saying exists because it's true for everyone who's ever stood where I'm standing — up against a wall that won't talk back, with hands full of seeds and no field to show for it. Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing happens. Until, one day, something happens.
The wall doesn't move because you stop pushing. It moves on its own time, for reasons it never owed you an explanation for. Your only job was never to make it fall. Your job was to keep showing up with the next seed.
So I'm trying to let go of the need for proof. To let the planting be its own kind of evidence, even when the ground stays quiet. To trust that the years without visible growth were never empty — they were just underground, doing the slow, invisible work that every real thing has to do before it breaks the surface.
And right now, that has to be enough.
Written in love, and in the very slow, very ongoing work of planting anyway —