But first, we crawl

When my little brother, EJ, was learning how to play the guitar, my home was a grand orchestra gone bad.We thought the guitar was broken or he just wasn't learning to play the strings  fast enough. There were days when he just wouldn't put the wooden thing down. He carried it every where. I know no part of our home that has not been tattooed with poor acoustic sounds.And we couldn't stop talking about it. Actually, we couldn't stop complaining to him and among ourselves about it. There were days we would kick him out of the room and other days, we just left him- he and his little music making instrument.And within all the little moments of sitting on the kitchen floor and writing tiny alphabets on every piece of paper, shutting the door and making breakfast, noise gradually begun to sound like music in our ears.My writer crush, Hannah Brencher, once wrote "Be a respecter of stories you don't understand."There will always be someone on the train with a different artinery. All the places on the map we do not want to go are standing out in yellow highlights on someone else's atlas. It's quite simple: Putting reasonable limitations on dreams crafted in someone's heart  is not always a good thing.People want to do and learn and explore and become. But the moment you begin to use your eyes to see only the bad side of the story, you become like a puddle of mud- making every step forward more difficult than the last. I yearn so earnestly to be an environment that cultivates the spirit of trial, that tolerates little acts of failure and one that fully embraces the final product of the building process.Truth is, a good seed has the potential to grow. And a good seed will, most certainly, grow. But all the Science in the world makes it very clear: We will need a little soil, a little sunshine, and a little water. And when the weather gets terrible, sometimes we have to move the flower pot to a better shade. And that's how we garden.The growth process doesn't take place in a factory. It takes more than blending supplements to get the work done. The growth process is a military camp with no weapons and army uniforms. It's when we take the first mile and give up before reaching the finishing line. It's where we fall and fail and give up and then, somehow manage to find our right footing on a tilted landscape.And if there's anything that makes this battle any easier to win, it is finding people in the dark hours holding your hand and whispering softly over your weary heart : " I see you. You're chasing this dream and you're doing just fine. I see you. You're winning, you're winning, you're winning, baby."Because being the right environment for growth is never easy. It requires constant reminders that we don't soar into soaring.  First we crawl, and then we sit up, then walk, and run, and fly and then, slowly and steadily, we touch the sky.