Honestly, the case for pushing through is strong. Dormancy can look identical to avoidance, and sometimes it is. I spent a long stretch in my late twenties calling a period of genuine stuckness “a fallow season,” and the language gave me permission to stay stuck longer than I needed to. The metaphor of cycles can become a hiding place, a way to spiritualize inertia. I want to be clear that I know this, because what I’m about to say might sound like its opposite: rest that feels unproductive is frequently doing something you cannot see, and the inability to see it is part of the design. Both things remain true at once. The trick is that you rarely get to know which one you’re in while you’re in it.
What changed my relationship to this was watching an actual garden through a full calendar year. Not mine; a neighbor’s, visible from a second-floor window. In January, the beds looked like nothing. Bare soil, some mulch, a few brown stems left standing. I remember thinking the whole plot had been abandoned. Then March came and the ground cracked open with green so fast it seemed theatrical. The roots had been working the entire time, in cold and in dark, drawing down nutrients, extending silently through soil I couldn’t see into. The boring months weren’t a pause in the story. They were the story, operating below the threshold of what a glance from a window could catch. I keep coming back to this not because nature metaphors are clever but because that specific surprise (the shock of abundance after apparent nothing) has repeated in my own inner life enough times that I’ve started to trust it, even when I can’t feel it happening.
So I hold both: the honest concession that “I’m in a resting phase” can be a comfortable lie, and the equally honest observation that some of the most important preparation happens in silence, underground, without any visible proof. You don’t get certainty about which one is operating. What you get is the willingness to stay attentive during the quiet, to keep your hands in the soil even when nothing is sprouting yet, and to notice the first green thing when it finally pushes through.