After I pulled out the peas I had diligently planted and tended because their season was over, a lone sunflower remained.
I smiled at it, wondering how it got there. Perhaps a bird or a squirrel or even the wind left a single seed to grow sheltered and nourished by the peas.
It smiled back at me, its bright yellow face bobbing in the wind, and said, “It’s so easy to be me.”
“Well, of course, it is,” I said back—out loud because there was no one around to hear me talking to a sunflower.
“You know what you are from the beginning. Everything you are is contained in your seed, which is amazing if you think about it. All a plant needs are the right conditions to grow. That’s its impulse. To grow and thrive.”
“What makes you so different?” The sunflower asked, and then left me to think my thoughts as she raised her face to the sun and danced in the wind. She was done talking.
It’s a great question.
What does make us different from the rest of nature that becomes what it is with ease? A duck doesn’t try to be a fox. A rose doesn’t want to be an oak tree.
Perhaps it’s our freedom to choose.
And within the freedom, we make life hard. We accept that life is about getting things, becoming somebody, earning a living, and proving our worth.
We try to be something other than what we are. We conclude that things that are easy for us to be aren’t worth much.
It’s a strange worldview we have agreed to accept. If it’s not hard to do, it’s not worth it. If we aren’t suffering, we don’t deserve it.
These beliefs cause immense pain and stress because we believe doing what is easy for us to be doesn’t count. Instead, it has become easy not to do what is easy for us to do. It has become easy to forget who we are and what we express in the world is contained in our “seed,” just as it is within the sunflower.
As a child, I knew myself as a writer. Yet, as an adult, I ran away from it for years because people told me I could never make money as a writer. As if that was the reason to write in the first place. Or if nobody reads what I write, it doesn’t have any value.
I also knew myself as a dancer. I would dance at night in my room after everyone went to bed, singing little songs to myself. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have to work at becoming a decent dancer. Years of daily classes. Years of practice to learn how to express well what was easy for me to be. But I loved it because it was who I was.
The same for writing. Although I knew myself as a writer, it doesn’t mean I was born good at it. Every day I work at becoming a better one. I take classes, go to conferences, study programs, listen to podcasts. And I read a lot of books. (Seriously, reading is a must for a writer and has to be the one thing that makes me say at least once a week, “I have to read,” and laugh because it is my favorite thing to do, ever.)
Just as the sunflower needed all the right conditions for it to grow and thrive, our “working at” whatever is easy for us to be provides us with all the right conditions. We have the same impulse as all of life. To grow and thrive.
What is easy for you to be? What has always been easy for you? That’s the valuable gift to the world that you offer. Choose that and then do the work to be good at it, for the joy and freedom of being yourself.
One more thing. Why not look at everything you do and ask yourself, “How can I make this easier?”
This question alone, asked a few times a day, opens up imagination and curiosity, and breaks the habit of accepting the false worldview that life is hard or it’s not worth it.
Make the sunflowers words your words. Say, “It’s so easy to be me.”
And then perhaps lift your face to the sun, sway with the wind, and smile. It’s easy to do. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.
PS
I would love to hear what you know yourself to be and what conditions you are designing for yourself to grow and thrive!
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
