Reflections on growth

The season before it looks like anything

There is a stage in working with clay that does not look like progress. The piece has already been shaped, but it is not dry enough to fire, and it is not wet enough to reshape either. There is nothing to do but wait.

Most of what I have built has gone through some version of that stage. Opulent House of Ceramics spent months looking like very little before it looked like anything at all. The businesses before it were the same way. So was writing Growth & Beyond. There is always a stretch in the middle where nothing visible is happening, and it is easy to read that as failure instead of what it actually is: the material doing what it needs to do before it can hold its shape.

I have learned to be a little more suspicious of the seasons that feel finished too quickly, and a little more patient with the ones that do not feel like anything yet. Growth rarely announces itself while it is happening. Most of the time, you only recognize it afterward, looking back at a version of yourself that could not have skipped the waiting.

If you are in a season like that right now, this is just a reminder that it is not nothing. It is only not finished yet.