I keep thinking about the life of a rose.

It begins as a tightly closed bud. There is nothing wrong with the bud because it has not yet opened. It isn't an incomplete version of the flower it will eventually become. It is simply the rose as it exists at that particular moment in its life.

And then, gradually, it unfolds.

One petal loosens and then another. Its shape changes as it encounters sunlight, rain, temperature, soil, wind and time. No two roses will unfold in precisely the same way because no two roses encounter precisely the same conditions.

There is no single moment when the rose finally becomes what it was supposed to be. The opening is part of its life, but so is everything that came before it and everything that follows.

Eventually the flower opens fully. And then something happens that we don't usually include when we use flowers as metaphors for human growth.

The petals begin to fall.

We tend to love the language of blooming. We tell people to blossom, flourish and become everything they were meant to be. But we rarely speak about what comes afterward.

The falling petals are not evidence that the rose has failed. They are simply another part of its unfolding.

And this matters to me because human lives unfold in much the same way. We have a tendency to imagine personal growth as movement toward some better version of ourselves—as though eventually, with enough insight, healing or effort, we will arrive.

But perhaps there is nowhere to arrive.

Perhaps we are unfolding throughout our entire lives.

We are shaped by circumstances we did not choose and experiences we could never have anticipated. We encounter relationships, opportunities, limitations, losses, joys, disappointments and possibilities. We understand something differently at sixty than we did at thirty. Something that once mattered enormously may eventually loosen its hold. Something we barely noticed may become deeply meaningful.

And through all of this, we can enter into a deeper relationship with the life that is actually ours.

We can notice what is happening.

We can ask questions.

We can examine what has shaped us and what continues to shape us.

We can become curious about what matters now.

We can recognize both our possibilities and our limitations.

We can consider how we want to be in relationship with ourselves, with other people, and with what life is asking of us in this particular moment.

This is what unfolding means to me.

It is not becoming a perfected self. It is not arriving at some final state of authenticity. It is not becoming the fully opened rose and remaining there forever.

It is participating in the life cycle itself.

And then there is one more part of the rose that I find especially meaningful.

After the petals fall, the story isn't necessarily over. When a rose has been pollinated, the base of the flower can develop into a rose hip—the fruit that contains its seeds.

Something remains.

Perhaps human lives are like that too.

What remains because we were here may have very little to do with conventional ideas of legacy. It doesn't have to be a book, a career, an accomplishment, or something that carries our name.

It might be children we loved and influenced.

It might be something we created.

It might be a friendship.

A garden.

Something we taught someone.

A pattern we interrupted.

A moment of compassion another person remembers.

A way we made someone feel seen.

An idea we shared that continued to travel long after we forgot the conversation.

We may never know all the ways our lives have touched other lives.

And perhaps we don't need to.

The rose does not unfold in order to produce an impressive rose hip. It simply participates in its own life, within the conditions in which it finds itself.

Perhaps there is something deeply human in that.

We are not here to become identical versions of some ideal human being. We each encounter a particular life, shaped by an extraordinary combination of circumstances, influences, possibilities and limitations.

Our invitation is not to become the rose beside us.

It is to enter more deeply into relationship with the life that is ours.

To unfold within it.

To remain curious about it.

To participate in it as fully as our circumstances allow.

And eventually, when our own petals have fallen, perhaps something will remain simply because we were here.

Joanne 💗