Find What You're Looking For

Until this week, I couldn't have told you what a crepe myrtle looked like. I knew it was a plant, might have guessed it was a tree (though I could easily have also guessed bush), and maybe would know that it flowered. That's it.

Now I see them everywhere.

A tree that I see on the regular now is a crepe myrtle. I knew this before it flowered this summer. Now that it's flowered, I find this plant immediately identifiable elsewhere.

The colors of the flowers pop against the green of the leaves. The trunks I find so unique the way they're shaped a twist in long slender segments. I feel confident that when these flowers fall, I'll still be able to see these beautiful trees around me all year long.

Here's the fascinating thing for me: They've been here all the time. They're ubiquitous in my neighborhood, I've seen them flower before, but I had never committed it to memory how to identify them.

I love the way the visual image of plants is recorded in the memory and how there's something that happens when you can name it.

It feels like this applies to so many places in our lives. Sometimes we have a dream but we can't quite articulate it yet. Once we have a word or phrase that fits, it comes into being so much more easily. Or, perhaps we have vision for what we want for our life but we don't know what it looks like. Once we see an example of someone else doing the thing, now we have a sense of what it can actually look like for us.

Once you start seeing something, it's hard to stop. But if you don' know what something looks like, it can be so easy to miss it.

When it comes to what you want to create in your life, what are you looking for? Where are there examples of this in your life or the lives of others? What would you call it?