A seed is alive while it waits

"A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die. When you go into a forest you probably tend to look up at the plants that have grown so much taller than you ever could. You probably don't look down, where just beneath your single footprint sit hundreds of seeds, each one alive and waiting. They hope against hope for an opportunity that will probably never come. More than half of these seeds will die before they feel the trigger that they are waiting for, and during awful years every single one of them will die. All this death hardly matters, because the single birch tree towering over you produces at least a quarter of a million new seeds every single year. When you are in the forest, for every tree that you see, there are at least a hundred more trees waiting in the soil, alive and fervently wishing to be.

A coconut is a seed that's as big as your head. It can float from the coast of Africa across the entire Atlantic Ocean and then take root and grow on a Caribbean island. In contrast, orchid seeds are tiny: one million of them put together add up to the weight of a single paper clip. Big or small, most of every seed is actually just food to sustain a waiting embryo. The embryo is a collection of only a few hundred cells, but it is a working blueprint for a real plant with root and shoot already formed.

When the embryo within a seed starts to grow, it basically just stretches out of its doubled-over waiting posture, elongating into official ownership of the form that it assumed years ago. The hard coat that surrounds a peach pit, a sesame or mustard seed, or a walnut's shell mostly exists to prevent this expansion. In the laboratory, we simply scratch the hard coat and add a little water and it's enough to make almost any seed grow. I must have cracked thousands of seeds over the years, and yet the next day's green never fails to amaze me.

Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you're supposed to be."

-- Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

This seems like a wonderful parable, doesn't it?


And as I read yet another autobiography, this time (yay!) of an intelligent lady, I'm realising that what I'm actually seeking are role models I can't seem to find or encounter in real life. Maybe because I don't meet enough people; or even when I do encounter fairly admirable persons, they are rarely opportunities to cultivate a mentoring relationship. And my being an introvert and all makes all of that extra hard, if not impossible.

I feel a painful dearth of people, especially women, to look up to and on whom I could place hope and seek advice. I know they must be out there, but they're not around me. It feels exhausting that yet again I feel I'm here alone, carving out a route for myself, hoping against hope, and praying hard, that this route will lead somewhere bright and beautiful some day.