Latest / She Survived: Stories of Courage, Recovery & Reinvention / Why Watching Grass Grow Heals Your Soul: The Quiet Power of Nature | She Survived
Transcript
- You have been running so hard that you forgot how to stand still long enough to notice the light changing on the floorboards. Stop. Just for a moment, put the phone down and listen to the silence between your own breaths. I want you to imagine, just for a second, what your internal landscape looks like right now. If I were to walk into your mind, would I find a bustling city street at rush hour? Horns blaring, people shouting over each other, lights flashing in every direction, demanding your attention, demanding your action, demanding your yes or your no or your answer right this very second. Or does it look more like a construction site, where the jackhammers never stop and the dust is coating everything in a thick layer of anxiety? Most of us live in that noise. We treat our attention like a currency we must spend constantly, buying validation, buying progress, buying the illusion that if we just keep moving, we will finally arrive somewhere safe. But here is the truth, the one that sits heavy in my chest when I think about all the women who come to me with tired eyes and clenched jaws: you cannot heal in the same environment that made you sick. You cannot find peace in the chaos because the chaos has become your baseline. It has become the water you swim in, and you have forgotten that there is air above the surface. You have forgotten that you are not a machine designed to output results until the battery dies. You are a living, breathing creature who needs to remember what it feels like to be merely present. We have been sold a lie, a beautiful, shiny, expensive lie that says your worth is tied to your utility. That if you are not building, fixing, cleaning, or creating, you are wasting time. We look at a patch of grass growing in a field and we do not see effort; we see nothing happening. We see idleness. And because we feel like failures when we sit still, we fill the void with noise. We scroll. We check emails. We worry about things that haven’t happened yet. We rehearse conversations we had three years ago. We try to control the uncontrollable by managing the trivial. But nature does not hustle. Watch a tree. Really watch one sometime, not with the eye of an appraiser looking for timber value, but with the eye of a friend meeting an old acquaintance. Does the oak tree worry about its branches being too short compared to the pine next to it? Does the fern apologize for unfurling slowly while the dandelion shoots up overnight? No. They simply are. They follow their own rhythm, dictated by sunlight, rain, and season, not by a quarterly goal or a social media trend. Their purpose is not to produce something external for your benefit. Their purpose is to exist fully in the moment they are given. To drink the sun. To hold the soil. To be exactly what they are meant to be, without apology or acceleration. This is a radical act in our world. To simply be. Be gentle with yourself today. Let the world spin without your help for a little while. I’ll be here, listening with you. Until next time.