When Growth Means Letting Go

The stories we cling to often keep us from planting the ones that could change everything.

Every time someone messages me after reading A Row With Two Chairs, I’m humbled.
Not just that they read it, but that they took the retelling of those moments and found something completely unique that I never knew could grow from it.

It just validates what I’ve been learning for the last twenty-one years: our stories are never just ours.

When we share them, they become seeds. Then seedlings. Then saplings.
And eventually they grow into the kind of trees that help others find shade, rest, or direction.

But here’s the thing about trees.
We get to choose which ones we keep holding onto.

Some were planted for us before we ever had a say.
Some we’ve outgrown but still cling to.
Some we hold onto out of habit, fear, or just the comfort of the familiar.
And some, perhaps the most sacred ones, are new seeds waiting to be planted.

For a long time I thought my book would be the ultimate tree.
The stories inside it provided a home base and a reminder of what’s possible.
And yes, it has been that for a long time.

But lately I’ve realized its most valuable gift isn’t the tree itself, it’s the seeds that come from it.

When someone else hears their own story in mine, they plant new seeds in their own lives, and they grow in ways I never could have imagined.
That’s the part I can’t control, and the part that excites me most.

But maybe it’s not just stories that work that way.
Maybe our entire lives do.

Because we all have something we’ve treated like a tree, something we thought was finished, complete, mature.
But over time, that tree stops growing, and the life it has to give is beyond it.

I’ve held tightly to a job, a relationship, a perceived calling, even a dream, only to find later that it was never where I was supposed to sit and stay.

So what happens when we stop guarding our stories and start planting them?
What happens when we stop worrying about how other people see us, and instead stand tall in the truth of who we actually are?

The world doesn’t need another perfectly polished tree.
It doesn’t need fake resolve.
It needs you.
It needs me.
Sharing who we really are, how we’re growing, failing, learning, blowing it, and beginning again.

The world needs more seeds in the soil.

Reflection:
What have you been treating like a finished tree, an anchor in your life, but deep down you see it is no longer growing?

What might happen if you planted it again?

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