Water the Seeds, Not the Struggle

We need to do better… but we can’t force our way into a kinder world.

At the root of who we are as individuals, we all want the same things: health, joy, peace, connection, a sense of contribution, belonging, acceptance…love. Yet our behaviors and attitudes often undermine the very futures we claim to be striving to reach. So why don’t we ask better from each other? Why don’t we put our foot down and require it?

Because we’ve tried, again and again. It doesn’t work. It can’t work.

Humanity has attempted to legislate morality through fear, punishment, and control for thousands of years. But every time, rebellion brews. True morality…kindness, honesty, compassion, peace…grows from within. Trying to impose it from the outside is like pulling on a flower’s petals to make it bloom faster. It’s like planting seeds and then yelling at them to grow faster. It doesn’t work. In the process of forcing, manipulating, and coercing, you ruin what would have been beautiful on its own.

We can’t make someone kind by threatening them. We can’t create compassion and understanding by mandating it. And when those overt methods fail, we turn to quieter weapons: ostracizing, shaming, exclusion, even the cold precision of the silent treatment. They may look different on the surface, but they all share the same root…control.

Love, compassion, and genuine understanding grow only in openness and light…in presence. It grows in the gentle space where a person is free to awaken on their own terms.

The irony is that the moment we stop trying to force change onto others is often the moment real change finally becomes possible. We can only awaken each other’s collective consciousness by practicing it and praising it one person at a time.

We’ve spent centuries trying to control each other. Maybe it’s time to understand each other instead. Every revolution that ever mattered — from civil rights to equality to peace — began not with a law, but with awareness. Quiet at first. Deep. Contagious. The kind that spreads when one person dares to truly see the humanity of another.

So here my call for our graceful rebellion:

Lead with kindness, not power, authority, or coercion.
Choose language that includes, not excludes.
Stop tugging on the petals. Start watering the seeds.

Live softly.