The Seeds of What Comes Next

I grew up watching Bob Ross with my Papa.

There was something so peaceful about watching him paint.

Not only because of what appeared on the canvas, but because of how he responded when it did not appear the way he intended.

A line would go somewhere it was not supposed to go.

The picture would begin moving away from the one he had imagined.

But he never seemed rattled.

It was simply a “happy little accident.”

The unexpected line became a tree.

A shadow.

The beginning of something the original plan had not included.

I think about that every time I look at my snapdragons.

I planted them in the planters.

The wind apparently had a different vision.

Seeds blew into the rocks, settled in places where nothing was supposed to grow, and slowly transformed them into a beautiful garden.

Not the garden I designed.

A garden I never would have known to design.

Life has a way of doing that too.

Sometimes it turns because we choose a new direction.

Sometimes the wind changes before we are ready.

It is easy to become so focused on what changed, what is missing, or what no longer looks like the picture we imagined that we cannot yet see what may be taking root.

What if the unexpected is not always an interruption of the story?

What if it is sometimes the first glimpse of a story we could not have imagined from where we began?

That does not make every change easy.

It does not mean we have to call every difficult moment beautiful.

But perhaps we can leave room for the possibility that something new is growing before we decide the picture has been ruined.

Maybe life is not asking us to pretend the line was intentional.

Maybe it is asking us to stay curious long enough to discover what the line could become.

A design reflection:

What if the life you never planned is already beginning to bloom in places you have not thought to look?