In March 2025, I planted a red ginger in my garden. I don’t remember exactly what I was expecting maybe a quicker payoff, maybe just to see if it would grow at all. Months passed. Nothing happened. I convinced myself I had planted it in the wrong spot that the light was wrong, that I had made a mistake I should just undo. I thought about cutting it more than once.
Then somehow I forgot about it. Life moved on just like the way it normally does and the plant sat there. Not thriving exactly but not dying either. Just present with it’s yellow and green leaves. Overlooked.
This week, I looked over and it was blooming! That vivid red spike red ginger is known for, rising above the leaves like it had been building toward this the whole time.
There was no announcement. No sign the week before that said “almost there.” Red ginger plants can take well over a year just to establish enough to send up their first flowering shoot. All of it happening below the surface and completely out of view. It simply reached the point it needed to reach, on a timeline that had nothing to do with my expectations of it.
The pictures we have in our heads when we plant something, we already have a picture of how it’s supposed to go. We imagine the timeline. We imagine what it will look like when it’s growing well. We imagine without really thinking about it that we will be able to see the progress along the way.
Life is a lot like that too. We start something like a relationship, a career move, a habit, a dream with a picture already in our minds of how it should unfold. Then reality doesn’t match the picture. The growth isn’t visible. The timeline stretches. The thing we planted just sits there and we start to wonder if we got it wrong.
So what do we do? Do we give up and tell ourselves we read the situation wrong from the start? Can we actually remain patient, not the performed kind of patience but the real kind where we genuinely stop needing daily proof that something is working? And if we do stay patient, what is the cost of that? What do we give up by continuing to wait for years, the energy, the moments we spent doubting instead of trusting?
I don’t think there is one right answer to any of those. Sometimes the honest move is to walk away from something that truly isn’t working. But sometimes what looks like “not working” is just a season we don’t have the patience to sit through and the real cost isn’t the waiting. It’s what we lose by quitting too early.
What would be happening while nothing seems to work? I think about how often I do this with things that aren’t plants. Let’s talk about a project that isn’t moving as fast as I would like, a skill I had almost quit learning, an idea I have decided is “probably not going to work.” We give things a window and when they don’t perform inside that window. Most times we call it a failure and start looking for the exit.
But growth is rarely visible from the outside while it’s happening. Roots don’t announce themselves. Neither does the quiet, unglamorous stretch where something is becoming ready, right before it becomes obvious.
I almost cut this plant down. I’m glad I forgot to.
Maybe the lesson isn’t really about patience as a virtue you practice on purpose. Maybe it’s simpler; sometimes the best thing you can do for something you believe in is just not get in its way while it takes the time it needs.
You will bloom too. Even if and especially if.
You have stopped expecting it.
TUHAME ❤️
