This morning, I watched a video of a sunflower blossoming in slow motion. Though I have watched films of flowers blooming before, I saw it differently this time. Blossoming isn’t an event so much as it is an unfolding. And it’s not even a single unfolding or the blossoming of just one flower, because a sunflower is actually an inflorescence, a flower head composed of many flowers. In the case of the sunflower—several hundred flowers of two different types: ray flowers (that are on the outside) and disk flowers (that are on the inside).

I watched the video a few times in a row. I watched those first few ray petals begin to move and I was so happy for them—starting out! Like watching babies learn to walk, or 7-year old’s learn to dive—those amazing first moments that happen and get caught in the blur of forward movement. I felt such a strong pull watching the first few petals unfolding and standing up—even as the rest of the sunflower remained closed.

Watching the first few petals, bright and yellow, anticipating what would come. And I thought of all the things that we try to do, and all of the selves we try to become, and how we judge ourselves against our imagined finished products and who we imagine we should be—without seeing or appreciating those first necessary petals.

In my work there’s an exercise we often do to help people learn how to be helpful leaders and coaches. It’s an exercise called “who helped me” and we have people think about the people in their lives who have helped them, and about whom they would say, “I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them.” We ask them to write about this person and say what they did and how they made them feel—and then share these thoughts with another person. When we poll the group about what the patterns of behavior were from these helpful people one behavior often stands out—the helpful people often saw something in the people they helped that they couldn’t yet see—and encouraged and challenged them with this vision of them.

And I would argue that what these ‘helpful’ people could see was the ‘unfolding.’ They could see those first few awkward petals and know, and trust, that the blossom would come in good time. And not only could they see it and trust it, but they were kind and generous enough to share it. Kind enough to say to their particular sunflower— “Have faith-- I can see your beautiful petals unfolding.”

And like sunflowers-- we too are inflorescences. We aren’t just one flower—we are made up of hundreds of flowers on their own trajectory of growth, bloom, and fade. And not all unfolding is the same. For things that are fun or easy or where we have a lot of support—the unfolding may happen easily, naturally and we may enjoy the process. But in places in us where we need to heal, where there has been hurt or grief—our petals may stay tightly closed for a long time. It may feel like a real risk to allow them to move. We don’t want anyone to see the stray petals, the tentative reaching—we want to be seen in full bloom. And we miss the beauty of the unfolding. The beauty of the courage it took to let go.

When we write we miss the beauty of the messy fragments and pages that we will never use—those early ray petals hidden by the bigger, later, blooms. In our work we may miss the awkward attempts when we learn to communicate in our field, get a procedure wrong, or fail to understand the implications of an action.

In our relationships we miss our attempts to connect, even when they fall short—and we may miss them when the people we love do the same. And when we work on healing our trauma or grief, we may see our meltdowns and first brave attempts at truth as pathetic, rather than as petals. Unfolding is a tender-hearted process.  But the final blossom, while an impressive end goal, is not what holds the radiance. The true wonder –which is hard to stop watching when you watch the film of the sunflower—is in the process of becoming. It isn’t the flower, but the unfolding, that is beautiful.

© 2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD