Fourteen days of bare soil

Someone on a balcony in Dammam presses a few seeds into a pot of soil and waters them. The next morning, nothing. A week later, still nothing. The pot looks exactly as it did on the first day, which is to say like a pot of dirt.

Most people who have never grown anything would give up around here. They would decide the seeds were bad, or that they had done something wrong, and tip the soil out to use the pot for something else.

What keeps a person watering is one line on the back of the packet: shoots appear in ten to fourteen days. That is all. Not encouragement, not a technique. Just the knowledge that the long stretch where nothing seems to happen is part of how it works, and that someone has been through it before and come out the other side.

Then, on the twelfth morning, there is green.

A great deal of worthwhile work looks like that pot for most of its life. A new skill, a small business waiting for its first regulars, a habit that takes months to show. The quiet stretch is not a sign of failure. It is most of the time the thing takes.

The people who get through it are rarely the most determined. They are the ones who know, from a packet or a friend or their own last attempt, that the change is on its way. And having seen it happen once, they are far more likely to plant again.