What roots do in the dark
Inertia ‒ 237
There’s something to love about gardening. Each spring, your garden shows you the truth about its winter—what you tended to when no one was looking, when the work seemed thankless, when growth looked like a simple act of faith. You have to think more about the journey before life breaks through the soil. The invisible. The patient accumulation. The faith in what you feed that will eventually insist itself into light.
What got me where I am today is a similar lesson. Nurturing different layers of myself that I’ve steam-pressed on top of each other over the years. From the love of daydreaming as a kid, playing out fantasy stories in my head, drawing scenes and storylines across a page, enjoying the storytelling in music, and listening to other people tell stories as we all grew up, to a broader love for the written word, sociology, psychology and how we engage well as a community of people—now my vocation.
I carry these private hours in a public body. The books I read eventually surface in memerable afternoon conversations. Morning workouts show up as steadiness of breath during a crisis or just everyday physical labour. The meals eaten alone become the energy I bring to crowded rooms.
What goes underneath our soil will rise up as the quality of a life that follows. My solitary miles on the bike as a teenager turned into highly sustainable social energy and optimism I built in and have no need to fake. Those dry—sometimes wet—mornings on the crooked English roads. The burn in my legs turned to euphoria. Those intense mornings allowed for spirited evenings where I could stay engaged while others flag.
We’re running out of places to hide in this world. We live and work around more people, where every video call keeps us at attention, back-to-back meetings strips another layer of energy to perform, and the masks we maintain have to stay on for weeks or months longer of regular contact. Fatigue is now a truth serum.
So the garden teaches you that private restoration enables a stronger public presence. And presence isn’t performance. It’s about being who you are shaped from the dark hours, the solitary miles, and the things you do when no one’s counting. We think of roots as hiding, they’re not. Every time we say yes to restoration, with presence over appearance and solitude over noise, we’re tending to ourselves and creating someone that’ll surface as real, not curated or manufactured.
Our own garden doesn’t lie. Neither do we, not really, anymore. Between those lines, we’re telling people who we wish to be. But what our roots are in the dark will always bring itself into the light.