A SEED DOES NOT EXPLAIN ITSELF - by Glory Afolabi: Glowing Indite

Today’s meditation took longer than usual. Perhaps because, lately, my mind has felt like a room with too many windows open at once, thoughts entering from everywhere, crossing one another, refusing to sit quietly. I have been caught somewhere in the middle of a project. Not at the beginning, where everything still feels possible, and not at the end, where the pieces finally make sense. Somewhere in between. The kind of place where turning back feels foolish, but moving forward requires a map you do not yet have. So I have been thinking. A lot. Drafting different outlines in my head. Recalculating decisions. Pulling ideas apart and putting them back together. Asking questions nobody else can hear. Building bridges between thoughts that, for now, exist only in my imagination. It is work. But from the outside, it probably looks like nothing. Then someone asked me, “What have you been doing all day? You’ve been indoors.” And I almost laughed. How do you explain mental labour to someone who can only see physical movement? How do you say, I have been working, when there is no tiredness in your body to point to, no finished document to hold up, no visible evidence that your mind has been travelling all day? Some work leaves dust on your clothes. Some leaves nothing but questions in your head. Later that evening, I visited someone I have come to regard as an elder. At some point during our conversation, I said, “I know I’m building something substantial, but I don’t know how to prove it.” He listened. Then he said something that stayed with me long after I left. He told me that when you are building something substantial, sometimes you have to be silent about it. Not secretive. Silent. There is a difference. He wasn't saying I should hide what I am building. Rather, he was warning me about the strange hunger to constantly prove that the thing exists. Because when you keep placing your unfinished work before people for approval, their opinions can become unwanted architects. One person says, That doesn't make sense. Another says, Are you sure this is worth your time? Someone else asks, What have you achieved with it so far? And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you begin to rebuild your dream according to the measurements of people who were never carrying the vision in the first place. You begin to wonder if the seed was worth planting. You begin to apologise for the tree because it has not yet grown tall enough. At first, I disagreed with him. Perhaps because part of me still wanted to be understood. I wanted people to know that I wasn't simply sitting around. That behind the quietness, something was moving. That beneath the stillness, there were plans, drafts, questions, failures, revisions, prayers, and attempts. I wanted them to see the construction site inside my head. But perhaps that is the very thing I am learning: Not everything that is growing needs an audience. We live in an age that celebrates the harvest and rarely talks about the soil. We see the book, but not the years of writing. The finished project, but not the nights of uncertainty. The successful person, but not the seasons when they looked like they were doing nothing at all. We are shown fruit so often that we have forgotten that fruit begins as something almost embarrassingly small, a seed beneath the ground, invisible and easy to mistake for nothing. And perhaps this is why so many young people feel irrelevant while they are still becoming. We have been taught to announce the result before we have had the patience to survive the process. But a seed does not become more alive because people clap for it. It simply keeps growing. So perhaps, for now, I will stop trying so hard to prove that I am building. I will build. Quietly, when quietness is necessary. Openly, when sharing can create connection. And carefully enough to know the difference between hiding and protecting something while it is still taking shape. I will let the work speak when it has found its voice. And until then, I will write, not to convince anyone that I am doing something meaningful, but because writing is one of the ways I make sense of what is happening inside me. Maybe that is enough. Maybe I don't have to hold a finished building in my hands before I am allowed to say, I am building. For now, there are only foundations. A few bricks. Some dust. A thousand unanswered questions. And somewhere beneath all of it, something I cannot fully see yet... GROWING.

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