Cultivation over control

When you want to grow a plant, you don’t crack the seed open and yank out its leaves. You place the seed in the soil, water it, and protect it from pests. This is cultivation.

Good practice is about cultivation, not control.

Control assumes you already know the outcome and how to get there. It’s another way of inflicting our personal will on reality. But if everything is controlled, we often exclude the very transformation we seek.

Instead of manipulating the elements into their final form, cultivation provides space for something truly unknowable to emerge.

Cultivation is open-ended. It invites the world, instead of batting it away to secure my personal outcome.

Control assumes reality is an adversary. Cultivation assumes it’s a partner.

In short, we don’t practice to become something in a linear, controllable way. We practice so that we’re available to be changed, often in ways we couldn’t have predicted.