We’re always listening to one of two things: our true self or something else. It could be our ego, other people’s advice, the culture. We become afraid to do the wrong thing, we’re scared to miss out, and that fear leads us away from ourselves.
That’s what fear does. It makes all things urgent, like a weed shooting up from the ground as soon as it’s been mowed over. Weeds grow fast, roots grow slowly.
Weeds are persistent. So is fear.
The antidote? Listening. Silence. Solitude.
In the quiet, we can hear our true self. When we clear away all the noise, all the other voices, we might finally, finally hear our own.
Here’s the thing: the inner voice doesn’t need validation. That’s why it comes as a whisper, not a shout.
It’s a listening life we want to cultivate. Cultivate, like a garden, tending to the slow-growing roots and digging out the weeds.
After listening to all the voices, all the advice, all the ways you’re supposed to do things, it’s taking a while to untangle the mess of it. Weeds upon weeds.
We can go inside ourselves to urge whatever’s growing in there to move quicker, but things grow in their own time. We can’t rush something that’s waiting to be born any more than we can force a flower to grow. Maybe under certain circumstances you can hurry things along, but mostly we wait.
We wait with expectation.
We wait with hope.
We wait in silence, knowing that when this thing finally pushes through, it will come with the loud sounds of life, a living thing in the world.
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