We don’t give gardeners enough credit for the amount of work they put into growing plants. A plant can take anywhere from three months to three years to fully mature, and once they do mature, they provide us with herbs, spices, fruits, and vegetables.
A lot of these plants grow underground, so the gardener has to wait patiently for them to grow. They must ensure that their plants are placed in the right environment, the soil is moist, the leaves are properly trimmed, the plants are properly fertilized, and the list goes on. If this is not done, all of the gardener’s work would have been for nothing.
Despite all of the steps the gardener must take to ensure that their harvest is great, the three most important qualities a gardener must have are patience, persistence, and trust. Patience is derived from the time the gardener spends waiting for their plants to grow into mature adults whether it takes a few months or a few years. Persistence comes from keeping up with the maintenance it takes to take care of their plants and making sure that they have optimal growth. Finally, trust comes from the gardener having faith in all of the effort they have put into taking care of their plants and believing that they will create a bountiful harvest.
Once these three qualities are met, then the gardener will be able to harvest the rewards from their garden.
The gardener’s logic can be applied to many different aspects of our lives, but for the common folk, its most important implementation is towards our goals. Patience, persistence, and trust are the key ingredients to the harvest and success of our goals.
Patience
Patience is a virtue, and patience is the first ingredient to growing your dream garden. As mentioned previously, some plants can take many months or years to grow, but the gardener knows the wait will be worth it in the end.
A person’s goals can only be accomplished once they have mastered the art of patience. Not all goals can be achieved in a day just like how plants cannot grow overnight. Some goals may require days, weeks, months, or even years before they are seen as being successful.
Root plants grow underneath the soil, and it is difficult to track the progress of their growth without digging it up and interrupting its growth cycle. If a plant is abruptly uprooted, the stems and roots can possibly become damaged, and it will be very difficult to salvage the plant.
If you rush a goal that you are striving for because you were impatient, you may not get the outcome that you were hoping for. You may feel far less satisfied with your results than if you were to take the appropriate amount of time working on it. Thus, the cycle of quitting and starting over goals is an easy hole to fall into. Impatience is a habit, but patience can also become a habit as well.
For as long as you have strong motivation, patience is achievable. With this, hope, tolerance, better decision-making, greater reputation, and greater rewards will be produced. You may not know when exactly your dreams and aspirations will come to fruition, but with time, they will flourish.
Persistence
Persistence is the second ingredient to growing the goals for your garden. Plants require lots of care and maintenance such as finding the right environment for them, keeping up with their moisture levels, trimming their leaves, giving them the proper plant food, and so much more. The gardener knows that the key to creating a successful garden is making sure that all of their plants' needs are met and that no corners are cut.
Persistence also ties in with patience for goal setting as well. You may be putting in lots of effort toward a task, but you might not see the progress right away. From working out at the gym and not seeing any visible progress to applying for dozens of jobs and getting rejection letter after rejection letter, it is important to stay persistent and to be patient.
The results that come from being persistent will help you thrive in life. Once you work on a goal for long enough, you will become a master at your efforts. Your motivation to complete your goal will also increase, and you will become more aware of what is working and what is not working.
Nothing in life can be achieved without persistence, and even if a goal ends up failing or not turning out the way you expected it to, it will be comforting knowing that you put in as much effort as possible into it.
Trust
The final ingredient in harvesting your dream garden is having trust. Trust is the final piece of foundation that makes any goal possible. It is the base and without it, patience and persistence cannot truly exist. We have all heard of the phrase, “trust the process,” and trust provides us with a sense of safety that everything will turn out okay in the end.
When the gardener plants their plants in the soil, all or most of the growth that is done is hidden from plain sight. There is no raw evidence that the plant exists, and it can be easy for outsiders to conclude that the gardener is just wasting their time. The gardener, however, knows that the plant is growing in silence and that it will bear food one day.
Just because another person may think a goal of yours is silly or useless, that doesn’t mean that it is meaningless. Remember that you are more knowledgeable about your goals than the outsider who merely exists to judge others.
Having trust leads to having strong beliefs, and having beliefs leads to the manifestation of your goals and endeavors.
Sometimes it will feel like you are working on your goals endlessly or for no reason at all, and the pressure from society is no help. You may see your peers effortlessly achieve their goals, and you may have people that don’t believe in you. No matter what the world tells you, you must trust that everything will fall into place and work out in the end.
The Harvest of Your Own Garden
With patience, persistence, and trust, the gardener has finally created their dream garden. And you, the reader, have the ability to create your own garden for your own goals and aspirations.
There does not exist a garden that doesn’t have tender love and care put into its plants, and we should treat our goals the same way. Plants cannot thrive in harsh environments just like how goals cannot be completed by having a negative attitude and neglecting them.
The tender love and care also stretch out to waiting patiently for the growth of the plant. Plants vary in when they will reach full growth and goals vary in when they will be achieved depending on their difficulty and complexity. There shouldn’t always be a time limit to reach these stages, but the trust that they will come to fruition is the glue that will hold your garden together.
We should take more advice from the gardener and treat our goals like how they treat their plants. Some goals are physical while others are not, but no matter what, all goals should be given patience, persistence, and trust. Only then will your garden create a bountiful harvest.
About the Author
Kennedy is a queer, African-American student at UNLV who is pursuing a B.A. in Psychology and plans on going into the field of marketing after graduation. She was born and raised in Las Vegas and has a dream of traveling the world one day. She is usually found playing video games, drawing, online shopping, or posing cute for the camera. They also have a love for bucket hats and have a plethora of fancy earrings to wear for each day of the week.