Things Take Longer

Things take longer than they told you. All of them.

The garden takes longer than the seed packet. The friendship, the real one, takes longer than the polite version. The career change takes longer than the LinkedIn post about the career change. The grief takes longer than the bereavement leave. Longer than the first year. Longer than other people are comfortable watching. The trust takes longer than the apology. The apology is the door. The trust is the room. The recovery, every recovery, takes longer than the diagnosis suggested it would.

You read that list and stopped at one of them. You know which one. That is the one you have been carrying too long, the one you have stopped telling people about, the one you have started to suspect is your fault. It is not your fault.

We are not living through a slow time. We are living through a feed that profits when you scroll. It shows you the result. It cannot show you the middle. You have been comparing your middle to their result. The middle is the thing.

I keep going out to check the peas. They are not up. They were planted on the right date. They are not late. They are waiting for the soil to be a temperature I cannot speed up. They are in the middle. The middle is what the seed packet does not show you. The peas are right.

What you cannot see is the work. The seed is doing something underground. The friendship is doing something in the months between the calls. The grief is doing something on the days you did not cry. The trust is doing something inside the person you are no longer watching. The unseen part is not the absence. The unseen part is where it happens.

You are not waiting. You are doing the work.

If you are in the part nobody can see yet, you are not behind. You are in the part nobody can see yet.