There once were two men, one older and another an adult, tending to their flower garden on their front lawn. The young man wanted to take up gardening after looking at the beautiful arrangement of flowers that the old man had planted and tended to.

Being a young man, he also took his time to do research and learned everything he needed to know about taking care of flowers and more. He learned he needed to water them on a regular basis and nurture them as they grew.

He was so thorough that it didn’t take long after that day for him to have a more beautiful flower bed than that of the old man’s.

It was easy, after all the old man, being old as he is, couldn’t afford to water his flowers every day.

However things turned suddenly for the worse when a hurricane struck. It was violent and destructive, and the young man was worried about his flowers.

After the hurricane subsided the next morning, the man walked out into his front yard.

He was shocked to see that his flower bed — in which he spent months caring and tending to — was torn apart.

Looking over to his neighbour’s lawn, he noticed that all of the flowers the old man planted were still intact.

“How could this happen?”

the young man asked the old man.

“I followed exactly what needed to be done flawlessly.”

“That’s where you are wrong.”

replied the old man.

“You took so much care of your flowers that they became dependent on you.”

“Because of that, their roots were smaller since they didn’t need to dig as deep to get nutrients compared to mine.”

Bide Your Time

At various points in our lives, we need to learn to bide our time. Constant care and attention does indeed nurture us, much like the young man watering his flowers on a routine basis.

Although that can make us have a more appealing appearance, it doesn’t quite strengthen us when we face complications in our lives.

At the end of the day we need to learn to strengthen ourselves and become reliant on ourselves.

We need to grow internally rather than always showing off how elegant and fantastic we are.

An Important Aspect Of Patience

This is another important aspect of patience as we are working to remove our own impatience. In order to do this, it truly is an inside job as we grow our roots deeper into the ground to find what is stressing us out or holding us back.

We simply can’t rely on getting things as quickly as possible or hustling to the best of our ability to get instant results.

It doesn’t make sense and at the end of the day we may fall back dramatically in the face of adversity.

So bide your time. The progress can be considerably slow and on the surface things may not look so good compared to others.

That being said, when adversity and set backs come — and believe me, they will — then you will be better prepared when you depend on yourself.

That isn’t to say the support of others isn’t needed, but the problem you face is your problem alone.

It can either make you more resilient than ever before or uproot you and throw you away.

The choice is entirely yours.

To your growth!

Eric S Burdon

This post is part of an 3 month writing challenge that I’m committing myself to. Every day for 3 months, I’ll be writing articles with specific criteria in mind. You can learn all about my reasoning as well as what that criteria is right here. This is 80 of 91 of this series.

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