Blooming where you land

3/24/2008

Blooming where you land

A couple of weeks ago, a trip to San Jose California took me through a stretch of the Mojave Desert southward from Las Vegas Nevada. I’ve driven that stretch a number of times – and although the desert has a beauty all its own, I’ve never considered it one of the prettiest pieces of road that I drive.

So it was with amazement when I came across a field of wildflowers growing just off the freeway. We’ve had a lot of rain in the American Southwest this year, and wildflowers have been turning up in all sorts of interesting places – Death Valley and the Mojave among them.

As I drove across the desert, it occurred to me how those flower seeds may have lain dormant for several years; it’s been a few years since the last wet winter – and that got me to thinking about our lives, our jobs, and how many of us wind up in places where we never expected to land.

Given their choice, those wildflower seeds would have probably preferred to wind up in a wetter climate, but here they were – blown into the Mojave, where precipitation is on the lean side.

And yet when they gained the water, they grew – and thrived.

In our lives, we sometimes wind up places that are less than ideal. We wind up in relationships that are challenging, companies that are difficult, jobs that take a lot of work – while some of us will wind up in circumstances with “precipitation” aplenty, still many of us wind up in locations where the benefits are few and far between. We might be in a company where we are never praised for our efforts, or in a team full of naysayers; we might end up in a position where we have little visibility, or in an economic climate that requires extraordinary effort, just to stay alive.

In those “desert” locations, remember the wildflowers – and how they watched and waited, until they gained enough moisture to grow – and blossom in a beautiful display of blue and gold.

The truth is that in many circumstances, it’s going to take a while before you are able to blossom – just like the wildflowers, it might take some time before the time is right for you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue preparing for that time – and then blossoming when the time comes – for all to see and appreciate.

Some years back, I was traveling in a remote part of Utah, and saw a tree sticking out of a rock. The tree was on a rock cliff, high above the highway – there was seemingly no other vegetation surrounding it. Somehow, that tree had managed to find root and thrive – even though it was in a seemingly “impossible” circumstance. It managed to find a crack where it could take root – and then through persistence, remain rooted there, despite the winds and storms that would assault it through the years.

It’s up to us to become like these two examples from nature – we must be persistent, take root, and then grow – and when presented with the right time, we must blossom for all we are worth.

Copyright, 2008, by Daryl R. Gibson and WeekdayWisdom.com. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.WeekdayWisdom.com.

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