Green

For a long time, I thought movement was proof of life. I thought urgency meant I was aligned and that wanting something badly enough could make it right. My days have been marked by forward motion; new plans, new versions of myself, new reasons to believe the next thing would finally hold me. I didn’t know yet that there are seasons where motion is not necessarily growth but avoidance in some form. Lately, I’ve been drawn to green. Not in a decorative way and not as a mood but as a condition. A way of being in the world that does not announce itself, does not demand witnesses and does not ask to be named correctly in order to exist.

Green accumulates; it waits until you stop narrating your life before it appears. We talk often about healing as if it were a peak, something you climb towards, something you arrive at all at once. What I’m learning is that arrival feels more like permission than clarity. Permission to rest inside what is already here, permission to stop and just be. There’s a kind of peace that feels unfamiliar at first because it does not wound you into recognition. It doesn’t arrive with adrenaline, intensity or the sharp edges we’ve been taught to associate with meaning. It literally asks nothing dramatic of you but to stay.

Staying as it turns out is not passive. Simone Weil once wrote about attention as a form of devotion. Waiting not as absence but as faith. I think about that often now, how much of my life was spent rushing forward, grasping, insisting that the future hurry toward me and how rarely I allowed myself to tend to what was already alive and well. I feel as though green teaches patience without instruction. It does not rush growth, and it does not confuse speed with depth. It grows below the surface first, where no one is watching, where nothing needs to be impressive or aesthetic. Roots do not compete for light; they tend to cooperate with the dark. This is something ecology understands instinctively and something we forget constantly.

Photosynthesis is precise; there is no urgency involved. There is intelligence in slowness and discipline in repeitition. Monet painted the same garden again and again, the longer he stayed with it, the more it revealed itself. Through light, darkness, seasons, weather, etc. There was attention there, repetition, intelligence and patience. I think about that when I feel the itch to reinvent myself, rebrand, to declare a new chapter, to narrate progress loudly enough that it feels real. I am learning slowly but surely to resist that impulse. I am learning to trust that something can be alive without being announced. I believe my body knew this before I did, nothing asked me to slow down my nervous system decided first. Safety as I know isn’t this profound absence of intensity, I believe it’s intensity without threat, a calm with a pulse, life that does not require us to brace for impact. I always mistook chaos for depth, acceleration for aliveness, chasing for productivity, wanting for purpose. It took stillness to correct me and certainly the color green.

Green shows you what remains when you stop proving, mistaking exhaustion for virtue, chase for productivity, and so forth. Aristotle believed rest was not the opposite of work but its fulfillment, that rest completed the labor. I am actively learning not to push past what finishes me. This season of my life does not ask me to become someone new; it just asks me to stay long enough to know myself, to practice choosing what sustains me, to stop interrupting my own life with urgency disguised as ambition and avoidance. Of course, there are still moments where I miss the fire and urgency. However, green is teaching me that it doesn’t measure its worth in milestones, it unfolds according to its own logic. Overall, green is teaching me to stay, to stay still perhaps, to tend to what is alive now, to honor the season I am in without demanding it transform into something else.