Where the Frame Ends
Today, I stopped beside an agave…
Not because it was the most beautiful plant in the garden. Around it grow palms, banana trees, flowering trees, and all that tropical greenery that reminds you that nature certainly has no craving for minimalism.
I stopped for something else.
From its center rises a long, almost unnaturally straight stalk. It wasn’t there until recently. Now it reaches upward with such confidence, as though it has known all along exactly where it belongs.
And yet perhaps it has no idea at all.
The agave is a peculiar plant.
It does not hurry.
For years, it can appear almost unchanged. A firm rosette of leaves close to the ground, no grand performances, no yearly need to prove that it still exists. While other plants around it bloom several times, shed their leaves, grow them back, and present the world with several little premieres of their own, the agave simply remains where it is.
It gathers light.
Water.
Time.
And above all, something that cannot be seen.
Energy.
Then, one day, it begins to send a flowering stalk up from its center.
In some species, it can grow several times taller than the plant itself. What has spent years living close to the ground suddenly begins reaching several meters into the air.
There is one thing about this that fascinates me.
When that stalk begins to grow, there is no sign waiting above it to mark its final height.
No line saying:
This is as far as you can go…
And perhaps this is exactly what we should learn from plants before we begin using them merely as decoration.
Because we humans draw lines all the time.
Across our résumés.
Across our calendars.
Across the ideas we have about ourselves.
Across the ideas we have about others.
By twenty, I should be here.
By thirty, I should already be there.
I should know this by now.
I should have figured this out by now.
I’m too young for this.
I’m already too old for that.
I don’t have the education for it.
I don’t have the right personality for it.
That’s just not who I am.
And gradually, we build an invisible greenhouse around our own lives.
There is enough light inside it to survive.
But its ceiling is too low to grow.
Perhaps one of the greatest misconceptions we have is the belief that we must know our destination before we can take the first step.
We like maps.
Maps are reassuring.
They tell us where we are, where we are going, and how many kilometers are left. But maps have one subtle disadvantage.
They only show places that someone has already named.
For some parts of life, no map exists.
And so we stand at the crossroads, waiting for a certainty that may never come.
We want to know whether a decision will turn out well before we make it.
We want to know whether someone will stay before we let them close.
We want to know whether our work will have meaning before we even begin.
We want to know the final chapter of a book we haven’t even opened yet.
But life is not a contract with the outcome already filled in.
It is much more like a garden.
You plant something.
You water something.
Something dies despite all the care you give it.
Something grows somewhere entirely different from where you planned.
And something you barely paid attention to for years wakes up one morning and sends a stalk high above your head.
There is something else I like about the agave.
When I look at it from a distance, its growth seems almost like an act of defiance.
For a long time, everything about it is horizontal.
Its leaves spread outward, staying close to the ground, forming a firm rosette.
And then, suddenly, a single vertical appears.
A single line reaching upward.
As though, after all those years, the plant were saying:
Now, somewhere else…
Perhaps this is exactly how some human changes look from the outside.
Sudden.
Except they are not sudden at all.
The only sudden thing is the moment when other people notice them.
No one sees the years during which a person has been quietly putting something together inside themselves.
Doubts.
Falls.
Silent changes of mind.
Things they forgave.
Things they could no longer forgive.
People they no longer felt the need to convince.
Fears that, one day, stopped being reason enough to remain where they were.
Then the people around them see only the stalk.
And say:
“You’ve changed.”
Perhaps.
But perhaps something that had been growing inward for a long time has simply, at last, begun to grow outward.
We have a strange tendency to regard the invisible periods of our lives as wasted time.
When there are no results, we think nothing is happening.
When we are no further ahead, we feel as though we are standing still.
When something takes us longer than it takes others, we begin to wonder whether we have fallen behind.
But nature does not know the word late.
It knows conditions.
It knows seasons.
It knows readiness.
A mango tree does not apologize to an agave for bearing fruit sooner.
A palm does not look down at a shrub and tell it to try harder.
And an agave does not lie awake at night wondering why it still hasn’t bloomed when the plant beside it is flowering for the third time.
We invented this strange mastery of comparison ourselves.
And we have become so good at it that we can diminish the value of our own journey simply because it does not resemble someone else’s.
Yet comparing two human lives is a little like measuring a palm and an agave with the same ruler and then declaring a winner.
The ruler will be accurate.
The conclusion utterly absurd.
Perhaps, then, you do not need to know how far you will grow.
Perhaps it is even better not to know.
Because if, at the beginning of every journey, we knew exactly where it would end, perhaps we would never set out on the most important ones.
Some distances look frightening only when we see them in their entirety.
Perhaps life has a good reason for showing us only a few meters ahead.
Not to torment us with uncertainty.
But because courage rarely means being unafraid of the entire journey.
Often, it simply means taking the next step without any proof that solid ground will follow.
And then there is one more thing about the agave that changes the entire picture.
For many species, flowering is the culmination of a long life cycle. The plant pours an enormous amount of stored energy into a single monumental inflorescence, and after flowering, the main rosette gradually dies away. Yet life often continues through offsets or seeds.
Suddenly, the stalk no longer looks like merely a symbol of growth.
It is also a symbol of giving.
And perhaps that is even more interesting.
Because we have grown accustomed to thinking of growth as addition.
More experience.
More success.
More money.
More possibilities.
More of everything.
And yet some of the greatest forms of human growth look exactly the opposite.
You leave something behind.
You let someone go.
You stop needing the last word.
You stop explaining your worth to people who insist on measuring it with the wrong ruler anyway.
You let go of an idea of life that once fit you, but has now become too small.
And you discover that growth is not always the ability to gain something.
Sometimes it is the ability to no longer carry something.
A tree grows by adding branches.
A person sometimes grows by laying down weight.
I look at the agave again.
Its stalk is not finished yet.
And that is precisely why it is beautiful.
It is a sentence without a full stop.
A road without a sign telling you how many kilometers remain.
A question that does not need an answer yet.
Perhaps we have become too accustomed to admiring finished things.
Finished houses.
Finished careers.
Finished relationships.
Finished people.
But no human being is finished.
And perhaps no one should be.
As long as we are alive, we are a draft written in pencil.
We erase some lines.
We add others in the margins.
Some chapters we would write entirely differently today.
And sometimes we discover that what we thought was the end of the story was merely a page where we had left the bookmark for far too long.
When I was photographing this agave, I tried to fit its entire stalk into the frame.
But the higher it grew, the more it began to escape the photograph.
And suddenly I realized what a strange metaphor I was holding in front of me.
Perhaps the most important thing is not how far a person grows.
Far more important is whether, somewhere along the way, they begin to make themselves smaller simply so they can still fit inside someone else’s frame.
Into their parents’ expectations.
Into society’s expectations.
Into a partner’s comfort.
Into the opinions of those around them.
Into the version of themselves they once, long ago, promised to the world.
But the frame of a photograph is not the boundary of the landscape.
And other people’s idea of who you are is not the boundary of who you can become.
Several meters higher, the agave has no idea that it no longer fits into my photograph.
It simply keeps going.
And perhaps that is precisely why, from time to time, we should ask ourselves a different question than:
“How far can I grow?”
Perhaps we should ask:
“Who ever told me that where the frame ends, I have to end too?”
Because some boundaries are not real.
They are merely the edge of the photograph.
And beyond them, there is still sky.
If you have read this far, thank you.
Perhaps today, you do not need to know where you will be a year from now, who will be beside you, what you will be capable of, or where the path you are standing on will eventually lead you.
It is enough not to mistake uncertainty for inability.
Or slowness for failure.
Because some things do not grow slowly because they do not know where they are going.
They grow slowly because one day, they will need the strength to grow higher than anyone expected.
Dedicated to everyone who is growing in ways no one can see yet.
To those whose journey did not fit into other people’s plans, charts, or expectations.
And above all, to those who still do not know how far they will grow.
You do not need to know.
The agave does not explain itself to anyone either.
It simply grows.
And the sky has never told it that it has grown too high…🤍
You came home!! So beautifully shared. I spent decades unlearning all that I learned in my first few years. I am most grateful for your light. I will share with you a gift I received just hours ago. Written by....you get to answer that. Reading this is an incredible way to start my day. Thank you from deep within my soul
I think we forget how much can be happening inside someone while everything looks exactly the same from the outside. I loved this ❤️