“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
- T.S. Eliot
Something is stirring.
I notice it every year right around this time. The light shifts. The air changes just enough that you want to open a window. Then, almost overnight, something that looked completely dead starts pushing through the ground.
I'm not a gardener (self-confessed house plant killer), but I'm a faithful observer. And what I've been watching these past weeks in my yard is making me think about more than just tulips.
Blossoming is not an event. It's a process. And most of it happens underground.
There's an entire season that happens before the flowers show up. The seed breaks open. The roots push out. The soil works. None of that makes the front page. Nobody takes a picture of it. But it is doing everything.
I've been in a few of those underground seasons in my own life. When I walked away from a near 20-year career at HGTV, from the outside it probably looked like a pause. Maybe even a step back. What was actually happening was something far more complicated. I was untangling who I was from what I did. I was clearing out the weeds and adding new soil.
And here I am again. Both of my daughters are out of the house now, fully launched into college, and I find myself in another one of those quiet, disorienting seasons of untangling. This time it's not a title I'm separating from. It's a role. Mom-as-the-center-of-everything is a harder identity to set down than I expected, and I won't pretend otherwise.
That invisible work is hard. It's disorienting. It doesn't come with a title or an audience.
But spring has this lovely way of reminding us that the unseen work is never wasted.
Here's what I want to say to anyone who feels like they are sitting in the uncomfortable in-between right now: you are not stuck. You are not behind. You might just be in the part of the process that happens before the blooming.
The questions worth sitting with this month are: What have I been quietly preparing for? What has the hard season been making possible? What is ready to bloom in my life that I haven't given myself permission to believe in yet?
Blossoming, in a person, isn't a moment. It's the result of everything that came before it. The clarity you fought for. The boundaries you finally held. The version of yourself you chose over the approval of others.
Spring doesn't apologize for the mess that came before it. It just blooms.
I think we could learn something from that.
TWO TIPS FOR BLOSSOMING
1. TAKE STOCK OF THE UNDERGROUND WORK
Before you look ahead to what you want to grow, take a few minutes to acknowledge what you've already been doing beneath the surface. Grab a notebook and finish this sentence: "In the last six months, I have quietly been doing the work of..." You may be surprised how much has actually been happening. We underestimate our own growth because we look for visible evidence instead of honoring the invisible progress.
2. GIVE ONE THING PERMISSION TO BLOOM
Most of us have something we've been holding back. A conversation we haven't had. A goal we haven't voiced. A version of ourselves we've been polishing in private but haven't been willing to show in public. This month, pick one. Just one. Let it see the light. Not because you're fully ready, but because spring doesn't wait for perfect conditions. Neither should you.
Traci Schubert Barrett is a Nashville-based keynote speaker and founding executive of HGTV, where she helped grow a fledgling idea into a billion-dollar brand. After two decades in media, she walked away to ask a bigger question: what if there’s more than success? That question became her award-winning book, What If There’s More?: Finding Significance Beyond Success, and her Healthy Ambition™ framework, which helps leaders and entrepreneurs achieve high performance without burnout. She is co-founder and President of Navigate the Journey.
