Steady

In January of 2023, I wrote a little poem called Steady.

Three and a half years later, I think I understand the poem a little better.

So much of life is spent trying to grow trees. We want the business to grow, the relationship to deepen, the children to flourish, the idea to become something, the work to matter, the investment to compound, the inner life to ripen. We look out at the branches and measure their progress, wondering whether all of our effort is actually working.

But the strange thing is, we can't actually make a tree grow. We can plant. We can till the soil, water what we've planted, pull a few weeds, and show up again tomorrow. There is a point where our hands reach the edge of their usefulness and something mysterious has to take over.

And this is, admittedly, pretty boring.

Most of the things that eventually become extraordinary are built through incredibly ordinary acts repeated for an incredibly long time. A conversation, a workout, a phone call, a page, a prayer, a deposit, a dinner around the table, a walk, another seed. None of it looks particularly impressive while we're doing it.

Unless, of course, you're in on the joke.

The joke is that the boring stuff is the stuff. We keep waiting for the music to arrive, while the needle is already sitting in the groove. Round and round the record goes. The repetition isn't interrupting the song. The repetition is where the song becomes audible.

And perhaps there is something even deeper hidden in that image.

We didn't spin the record.

Someone else did.

Call it God. Call it Love. They answer to both.

The record was spinning long before we arrived, and it will continue spinning long after we're gone. There is a rhythm underneath all of this that we didn't compose—a movement beneath our movement, a pulse beneath our pulse. Our small hands don't make the record turn. They are more like the needle. We touch the grooves that are already there, and somehow, through that contact, music emerges.

Maybe life is more like a river in that way. We spend so much energy trying to manufacture the current, pushing and pulling and rowing harder, when the river is already flowing. We don't have to create the water or convince it which direction to move. We just have to step into it, feel the current, and learn to move with what is already moving.

Perhaps this is what steadiness actually asks of us: not control, but participation. Not forcing the tree to grow, but tending the soil. Not spinning the record faster, but staying in the groove. Not manufacturing the river, but stepping into its flow.

There is tremendous relief in that. Our responsibility becomes smaller, but somehow more sacred. We tend the little patch of earth we've been given. We plant what we can plant. We love the people in front of us. We make the call, write the page, take the walk, say the prayer, make the deposit, have the conversation. And then we trust the hidden work happening underneath it all.

Because beneath the soil, things are moving. Beneath the surface, the river is flowing. Beneath all the noise, the record is spinning.

Maybe the invitation isn't to make more happen. Maybe it's to become steady enough to hear what is already happening—to find our place in the groove, put our hands back in the soil, and join the song that was playing long before we arrived.

And maybe that's why I still love the last line of this little poem: “Smiling, we learn to hum in the humus.”

Humus is Latin for earth, soil, ground. It is also where we get the word humility.

To be humble, then, is to come back down to earth. To remember what we are and what we aren't. We aren't the ones making the tree grow. We aren't spinning the record. We aren't pushing the river downstream.

We just get to put our hands in the dirt and participate.

And if we listen closely enough, maybe we can hear the music from there.

Cheers,

Ashton