The Stories We Tell by Joanna Gaines

Author:Joanna Gaines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Select
Published: 2022-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’VE ALWAYS HEARD that back in the day farmers couldn’t work the same land too many times. It needed a break from what they’d been planting to be restored back to health. The soil needed something different to yield a full harvest again. I’m starting to think our roots are much the same. Meant to grow and produce, then wither and rest, to have space to expand. That maybe even the strongest of them aren’t meant to stay in one place but to grow outward, in new directions, in new ways, under different circumstances, in different hands.

For a while, the idea of being deeply rooted may have looked to me like stability. Like steadiness. Like staying in one house long enough to repaint the walls. But what I’m learning is that roots need a rhythm of their own. They need cycles of cultivation and rest. They need to taste new soil and they need to move around. They need change too, for a chance at growth.

Growth by its very nature requires change, doesn’t it? I don’t think we get to have one without the other. These two things are wisely and intricately woven together.

I’m realizing that when I’m rooted in the right things, change doesn’t threaten growth. It catalyzes it. So that’s what I’m after: a way of living that grows toward change rather than against it, that strengthens with every shift that life brings.

I still have to fight off tendencies to control the narrative. This has meant unlearning decades of being outcome-oriented, and I gather I’m not alone. Consider the way we begin a new year, thinking about the goals we want to achieve, asking ourselves where we want to be at the end of that year, at the end of five years, at the end of ten years. The last scene of a movie, the final page of a book, the finished meal on the table—we judge a lot of things by how they turn out. And through all of this, it seems we’ve learned to glorify the outcome of something far more than the defining moments that got us there: the spark that caught our heart’s interest in the first place, times we wanted to give up but didn’t, even the beauty of embracing change along the way, the courage and intent it took to stick with something we believed in. All the lessons we picked up that we might not have learned otherwise.

Maybe you’re the planning type. You like to have a picture in your mind of where you want to end up, and you work your way back from it. I was that way for a while, but I found that too many distractions along the way could make me feel like I was failing every time I misstepped or was forced to reroute. I was always holding expectations, focusing on the outcome and what might come after it, forgetting that so much gets worked out during the journey. That’s where the endless choices exist.

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