Chapter 14 · 3 min 34 sec
Good Things Grow Slow
Patience as a radical act — the dignity of slow, deliberate growth over time.
Lyrics· 230 words
Everybody's running somewhere Everybody's chasing gold Lookin' for a shortcut highway Tryin' not to go I've been down that road before I've been fast and I've been wrong Now I'm sittin' on the front porch Watchin' summer come along
Funny how the little things take the longest time Good things grow slow That's what I've come to know The strongest trees don't rush where they go Love takes time, so just let it go
Good things grow slow Good things grow slow I've seen gardens turn to forests I've seen children learn to fly One day they're holding your finger Next day they're waving goodbye And the moments that you treasure Never happen when you chase
They arrive without a warning And leave a smile upon your face Good things grow slow That's what I've come to know The strongest trees don't rush where they go Love takes time, so just let it go
Good things grow slow Good things grow slow So take a breath And watch the sunset fall The world keeps turning anyway You don't have to run at all Good things grow slow That's what I've come to know
The best days come when you stop stealing Tomorrow love takes time So does every soul Good things grow slow Good things grow slow The river never hurries The mountains never raise
Somehow they still get there
*A story about learning to wait*
The day Rafael planted the tomato seeds, he expected tomatoes by the weekend.
His grandmother had given him a small plot of the garden — three square metres of earth along the south wall — and helped him dig it and add the dark compost and press the seeds in at the right depth. "Now we wait," she said.
"How long?" Rafael asked.
"Months," she said.
He looked at the flat, featureless soil. "Months?"
"Good things grow slow," his grandmother said. "Bad things grow fast. Weeds, mould, rust. The things worth having take their time."
He went back the next morning and stared at the soil. Nothing.
He went back three days later. Still nothing.
After a week, he stopped looking every day. It felt pointless. Something so slow it couldn't be watched — what was the satisfaction in that?
Then one morning at the end of the third week he walked past the bed on his way to something else and stopped.
Green. The faintest thread of green, so thin he had to crouch down to be sure. Two of them, side by side, barely thicker than a piece of string.
He called his grandmother.
She came out and crouched beside him, and something in her face when she looked at the seedlings made him feel like he had won something.
"They took their time," she said.
"They really did," said Rafael.
He started checking again after that, but differently — not impatiently, waiting for an outcome, but curiously, wanting to see what had changed since yesterday. He began to find he liked this kind of watching. The plant had its own pace, its own ideas about what it was going to do and when.
By August, he had more tomatoes than the family could eat.
He ate the first one standing in the garden, warm from the sun, and it tasted like nothing he had ever had from a shop. He thought it tasted like waiting. Like something that had been given exactly the time it needed.
"Well?" his grandmother said.
"It was worth it," he said.
She didn't say *I told you so*, which he appreciated.
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*The things that matter most cannot be rushed. Patience is not waiting — it is trusting.*
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