Control and courage

On my way out of the office last Friday, I saw a single white wildflower growing out of a crack in the parking lot. It was nestled right in the corner between the level that the cars drive on and the sidewalk that people walk on.

It was about eight inches tall with Irish green leaves, and it was growing its heart out. I saw it, and it made me smile, and I said to myself, “I should take a picture of that.”

Then I got in the car, and forgot.

That little wildflower was alive. It wasn’t even in the ideal location for life of its type, but it had found itself a place in the world to spread a few roots, and it’s going to grow in that crack for as long as the sky will water it.

Beautiful pluck struggles to break through the cement in hyper-controlled environments. Environments where every metric is logged and every output organized can become environments where a little white wildflower will get cut down through the weekly Wednesday Weeding program.

Control and wildflowers don’t work well together: organizational efficiency doesn’t always support the unfolding of organisms. Yet without organisms, organizations ultimately collapse.

Control tells us that if we can just grip life and people more tightly, we can wring more out of them.

But instead it turns out that the more we move through the world with full, trusting hearts—that is, the more we choose courage—and the more we open up to our environments rather than becoming less and less sensitive to them, the more room we gain to experience life itself, those we share this life with, and the joy and beauty of growing our hearts out together.