If I didn’t believe people couldn’t learn, grow, and change, I would go do something else for a living.
Sometimes they don’t want to.
Sometimes they make you think for a long while they won’t either.
And yet, we all have the capacity for learning, growing, and changing.
If we don’t do this work, we are dying faster than we already are.
Sure, change is hard.
And scary.
And almost always uncomfortable.
Yet it is one of our only constants in this life.
And a lot of the time, if not all of the time, somehow and someway, it ends up being okay.
Even better than okay.
Probably even good.
So, so good.
Two years ago, when I told my neighbor that we were taking down a huge pine tree and replacing it with wildflowers, she told me she didn’t think that was a good idea and wouldn’t like it.
She then proceeded to print off pages of my city’s ordinances and leave them in my mailbox with a sticky note not to upset the whole neighborhood with my wildflowers.
If you’ve done the Dare to Lead™ training with me (the next one is September 20th-22nd), you know this is using the invisible army and passive-aggressive, and you probably also know how fired up I was about it all while extending the most generous assumption.
Here we are, year two of these wildflowers and thousands of blooms later. This year I also added poppies.
And every day, that neighbor spends no less than twenty minutes wandering my yard in total awe and joy looking at my flowers. She told me it is one of the best parts of her day. That she loves watching the goldfinches in the morning especially checking to see what new blooms we have.
We can all learn and grow and change.
Sometimes, it will bloom in us when we aren’t even wanting it, trying to, or knowing that we need it.