Is the soil of your everyday life nourishing the person you are becoming?
We think a lot about romantic love. About finding the right person.
But perhaps we should also pay attention to the good souls already around us.
Because good-soul friendships can become the soil in which we learn what it feels like to grow as ourselves.
To feel understood. To feel free.
To not have to make ourselves smaller in order to stay connected.
And when that soil is well nourished, something important happens.
It becomes a reference point.
You begin to know the conditions in which you flourish.
So when romantic love comes, you are not asking it to create those conditions from nothing. You already know what it feels like to be yourself beside another person.
Romantic love shouldn’t require you to leave that environment in exchange for intimacy.
It should allow you to keep growing in that same freedom, with another dimension added to it.
A pull. Touch. Desire.
Intimacy. Romantic love.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of the good souls in our lives.
They don’t just grow beside us. They help us recognise the soil in which we flourish, so when we choose to grow beside someone we love,
we already know what good soil feels like.
