Growing vegetables can be a tool to remind yourself that you are resilient. And with enough practice, you start to really believe and embody your resilience.

Most of us feel helpless at least part of the time. And many of us feel helpless a lot of the time, especially in the face of problems that are so much bigger than us. One tool if one is mired in helplessness is to do something small.

When gardening is presented as a poverty alleviation tool in the development literature there are very mixed results: it’s hard to produce an income growing food on a tiny scale. It’s hard to produce cheaply and abundantly enough. It’s hard to find space and time etc. Possible, but difficult. At worst, failure on these terms makes people feel even more helpless.

I wonder if we should rather think of growing as a way to practice resilience. To see the effects of our efforts, even on a tiny scale. It is a universal truth that when a seed is planted in the right conditions, it grows. It is also our nature as humans to watch and learn— to actively notice when conditions are right. And tapping into those universal truths is one of the most powerful psychological tools we can harness.

Practice builds the muscle. If we just keep going, keep planting, watching, waiting, transplanting, composting, we see that we are resilient, at the most basic level.

We can always do something. We can always make things a little better. So here’s to that process!

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