What We Water Matters

For a long time, I didn’t realize I was living inside a belief. I thought it was simply who I was. I believed I was not smart enough, not capable enough, and not the kind of person who could do difficult things. That belief didn’t arrive overnight. It grew slowly, like something watered quietly for years, until it felt solid and unquestionable. When I look back now, I can see where some of those seeds came from.

As a child, I was naturally curious. I wanted to try things, explore, and ask questions. I felt alive when there was something new to learn, something unfamiliar to touch or understand. But in my home, curiosity often met a wall. I heard “no” so often that eventually I stopped asking. It wasn’t that my father didn’t love me. It was that he didn’t believe in himself and without meaning to, he passed that lack of belief on to me.

My father is a talented man. He is an artist, a singer, and a musician who taught himself how to play instruments. Creativity lives inside him in a very natural way. But he also lives with heart disease and that shaped the course of his life. He worked at a boat factory doing physical labor and his body struggled to keep up. He couldn’t sustain the work the way others could and he couldn’t follow the life he might have lived if his health had allowed it.

Over time, harsh comments from others about staying at home and not working began to emasculate him. They wounded him deeply. I watched that pain harden into anger and into a defeated way of meeting life. When things became even a little harder, he would give up. He wouldn’t try. And as a child, when the person you look up to give up again and again, you begin to learn something without anyone ever saying it out loud: that trying is dangerous, that effort leads to disappointment, and that dreams are something you should put down before life humiliates you.

I remember being young and full of questions but no one answered them. I grew up in an environment with very little stimulation, very little encouragement, and very little sense that possibility was real. Slowly, quietly, my mind formed a conclusion: maybe I was stupid, maybe I wasn’t capable, or maybe I didn’t have what other people had.

That thought became one of the strongest seeds in my inner world. I’ve come to understand the mind as a field. Every thought, every feeling, every word we repeat becomes a seed. Within each of us live countless seeds of joy and suffering, clarity and confusion, love and fear, and remembering and forgetting. Some of these seeds come from our ancestors. Some are planted before we are even born. Others are sown in childhood through family, culture, education, and lived experience. All of them rest quietly beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to arise. What we give our attention to is what grows.

For many years, I watered the seed of self-doubt without realizing it. I watered it with my inner voice, with hesitation, with the way I interpreted the world. Even when something good happened, the old belief would whisper, “It’s luck. It won’t last. You’re not really capable.” Without awareness, I believed my perceptions completely. I didn’t know I was mistaking a long-held mental image of myself for reality.

Meditation changed that. Not by fixing me, but by giving me space. During quiet moments, the thought would arise again: “I’m stupid.” And instead of immediately agreeing with it, I learned to pause. I learned to look at it. I learned to ask, gently, “Am I sure?” That single question softened something that had felt immovable for decades. The thought didn’t disappear but it lost its authority.

Little by little, I stopped feeding the old belief that said I was incapable. I didn’t fight it aggressively or try to replace it with forced confidence. I simply began giving more attention to different qualities: presence, breath, steadiness, and the quiet courage to try again. What surprised me most was that I didn’t need to become someone else. I just needed to stop believing everything my mind presented as truth.

At forty, something in me began to shift in a way the younger version of me would never have believed possible, the idea of returning to school, of studying science psychology no longer feels unrealistic. Learning no longer feels dangerous. Curiosity has returned. And for the first time, I’m allowing myself to imagine a future shaped by interest rather than fear.

When understanding replaces grasping, something changes in the way we meet life. Old patterns loosen. What once felt like an enemy becomes something we can hold with curiosity. Confusion and clarity are no longer opposites. Like compost and flowers, they exist in the same field, transforming one another. The present moment holds both past and future, and real change does not happen somewhere else. It happens here, in how we breathe, in how we look, and in how we choose what to nourish.

Awareness is like sunlight. Breath is like rain. Over time, they soften old knots and loosen long-held patterns stored not just in the mind but in the body. And the more I practice, the more I understand this quietly in my bones: nothing truly begins from nothing and nothing ever fully disappears. There is less to grasp and less to push away. There is only this living field of mind and the daily choice of what we tend.

I am also learning that our parents give us both kinds of seeds. They pass down fear, limitation, and unfinished pain and they also pass down love, talent, and beauty. My father gave me seeds of music and creativity, even if life made him forget his own light for a long time. My work now is to tend the field differently so that what continues forward is not only survival but also understanding.

When we see clearly what we are watering, life becomes a little easier to move through. We learn to ride the waves of change with more compassion, more steadiness, and sometimes, with a quiet smile.