ImpromptuEnlightenment

​One of my all-time favorite books is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

 

It’s one of those stories that doesn’t just entertain you — it stays with you. It follows a young girl named Francie Nolan, growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Francie isn’t living an easy life. Her world is tight and complicated and often painful, the kind of life that makes you notice everything because you can’t afford not to. And yet she remains deeply alive inside herself. She observes. She reflects. She keeps finding meaning — even when it would be easy to give up on it altogether.

 

That’s why I’ve always loved how Betty Smith writes. She doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but she also doesn’t flatten the human spirit into tragedy. Her writing has dignity. It has honesty. And it has this rare ability to make you feel like the smallest moment still matters.

 

At the end of the book, Francie makes an inward vow — a self-statement — and it is one of the most profound expressions of being human I’ve ever read. It doesn’t ask for a perfect life. It doesn’t ask for pain to disappear. It doesn’t ask for everything to be fair.

 

It simply asks to fully experience.

 

Here’s the passage:

 

“Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be cold, let me be warm. Let me be hungry or have too much to eat. Let me be honorable or let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute.”

 

When I read that, I don’t hear drama. I hear clarity.

 

I hear a human being making a decision: don’t let me miss my own life.

 

That vow isn’t about being good. It isn’t about being impressive. It isn’t about being spiritual or above it all. It’s about presence. It’s about meaning. It’s about the internal insistence that life won’t just happen to you — you’re going to be in it while it’s happening.

 

This is what Francie is really saying: I don’t need life to be easy. I don’t need life to be comfortable. I don’t even need life to be consistent. But let me feel it. Let me be real inside it. Let me have texture. Let me have purpose. Let me have substance. Let me be something, every single minute.

 

That is InnerTerrain integrity. That is Choice & Movement at its most honest — not as a motivational quote, but as a refusal to disappear into numbness. It’s Self-Authorship as a lived decision: not waiting for the world to hand you meaning, but creating it inside yourself, one minute at a time.

 

And then there’s the tree.

 

In the book, there’s a tree that grows where it shouldn’t be able to grow — out of hard ground, out of cement, out of the kind of place nobody tends. Nobody waters it. Nobody protects it. Nobody even notices it for a long time. And yet it grows anyway. It grows because it wants to live. It grows because something in it knows how to keep going without permission, without attention, without ideal conditions. That tree doesn’t need the world to cooperate in order to become what it already is — it simply lives its own experience, fully, right where it is.

 

I’ve always loved that image because it isn’t sentimental. It isn’t “cute.” It’s real. That tree didn’t wait for conditions to be perfect. It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t require approval. It simply did what living things do: it lived. It reached. It trusted the fact that life knows how to move forward, even in a crack.

 

That’s what Francie is doing too.

 

And that is what so many of us are doing — whether we give ourselves credit for it or not.

 

A lot of people are living in cracks. In-between seasons. In-between resources. In-between support. In-between certainty. And yet something in us still keeps going. Something in us still wants to matter. We don’t always say it out loud. Sometimes we barely admit it to ourselves. But it’s there.

 

And maybe that’s what that vow really is: permission.

 

Permission to stop waiting.

 

Permission to stop postponing your life until everything is ideal.

 

Permission to be cold and warm, hungry and full, honorable and imperfect — and still be a meaningful human being inside all of it.

 

So should you.

 

Not as pressure. Not as performance. Not as some polished version of you.

 

Just you — fully here — every blessed minute.

 

© Original work by Rev. Tina M. Adkins