CHAPTER 1

       SETTING AN INTENTION TO BLOOM

      Change is inevitable. Growth is intentional.

      —GLENDA CLOUD

      The first principle of blooming in the dark is Setting an Intention to Bloom. Before we get to why this is important and how one goes about setting an intention to bloom, let’s get even more clear about what blooming in the dark is all about.

      Resilience. It’s a popular word these days. Maybe when you think of blooming in the dark, you think of resilience. It’s a similar concept, but not quite the same. There are many different ways of defining resilience. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences”²⁵. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security²⁶ defines resilience as “the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or successfully adapt to adversity or a change in conditions.” A meme on the internet said resilience is “the courage to come back”²⁷. I like that definition the best.

      Adapting or “coming back” can mean any number of things. It might mean getting back in the driver’s seat after experiencing a car accident. Or, interviewing for another job after being rejected by the last ten companies with whom you’ve interviewed. Or, falling in love again after you have been betrayed. To me, resilience is about not letting an adversity define you or your dreams.

       Blooming in the Dark Is More than Being Resilient

      Blooming in the dark includes the idea of resilience, but it’s about even more than that. When you bloom in the dark, you don’t just bounce back from a trauma or adapt to adversity—you become more as a result of that trauma or adversity. Let me use an example of a coil spring to help explain what I mean. When a spring gets pushed down, and then the pressure is released, what does it do? Your first answer might be, “It springs back into the shape it was before.” That picture or answer would be the essence of resilience. Coming back to one’s original state.

      But there’s more to the picture than that. When you push down on a spring that is, for instance, resting on a table, you have to use a degree of force. It takes some energy to collapse those rings onto one another, and that energy has to go somewhere. When you release your finger, the energy inside the spring is released, and with a boing! the spring expands upward. If you watch carefully, you’ll see that the spring stretches out farther and becomes longer than it had been originally, before it was collapsed upon itself. Already the spring is becoming more as a result of having been under pressure.

      The “moreness” doesn’t stop there. When you release the pressure of your finger from the spring, it doesn’t just bounce back to its original state. The spring actually lifts off the table it was resting on and is propelled upward and forward. The larger the spring and the greater the pressure put on it, the farther it will go. The spring will become more, permanently more, as a result of having been under pressure.

      When we choose to bloom in the dark, we are allowing the pressure exerted upon our lives to infuse us with the energy we need to propel forward in our lives. We don’t become more despite the pressure; we become more as a result of the pressure. A spring can’t “spring” unless it collapses and momentarily doesn’t look like a spring at all. As Night Bloomers, we can’t “spring” forward into a more incredible version of ourselves without something collapsing in our lives either. Like the spring, when that trial or trauma comes, for a while we might not resemble the people we used to be. It looks and often feels like we’re smaller, weaker, and less than our previous selves.

      But despite how it looks and feels, that’s not the truth of the situation. The truth is that while we’re in that down position, looking and feeling like less than we were, we are absorbing the energy we need to become even more glorious than we were before that trial came. We’re absorbing the nutrients to grow.

      Do you see it? The weight of that pain has not been placed on you to destroy you. No, that weighty pain is there to give you what you need to grow and bloom.

       People Who Bloom in the Dark Become More than They Were

      Let’s return to the examples we used earlier to help define resilience: the driver driving again, the job seeker seeking again, the lover loving again. Now let’s take it a step further and see what it would look like if these people bloomed in the dark, allowing their adversity to propel them forward in life. The woman didn’t just drive her car again after the accident, she also became a more patient driver and a more patient person in general. Her character permanently changed, and this change significantly improved her relationship with her husband, children, and friends.

      The man didn’t just continue to interview for jobs after experiencing a series of rejections. He took the time to do some difficult soul-searching with the help of a therapist and realized that deep down he didn’t believe he was worth hiring. He expected rejection, not just from potential employers, but from everyone