Joanna Gaines Encourages Readers To ‘Surrender Ourselves To Growth’ as Seasons Change
By Movieguide® Contributor
HGTV star Joanna Gaines reflected on fortitude and perseverance as she approached autumn.
“It may be no surprise that I love a good reveal. By mid-August, I’m ready for cooler winds and golden leaves,” she wrote in a blog post last summer. “In some ways, I feel like I was made for this side of life. To create and build and help something prosper. It’s the harvesting part I haven’t always been great at, the savoring of what we’ve sown.”
Gaines added that she is thinking about fortitude and “sinking into the strength earned” that comes from hardship.
“Fortitude is not always a trait you can spot in a person,” she explained. “It doesn’t show up in what we wear or how we carry ourselves. But when we’re tested, then our strength shows. We forget it’s there until the day we need it. Until the day we find ourselves in the middle of hurt or adversity or stress. Until the day something or someone has left us wondering how we’ll make it to the next.”
She continued, “What we learn is that life is not about holding out only for the days of brightest possibility. It’s not only about finding ourselves a crisp new page. Sometimes, in order to move forward, we have to surrender ourselves to the promise of growth that follows the fall. Easier said than done, yes — one thousand times yes.”
One of the things Gaines mentioned that she is personally working through is her oldest son Drake’s departure for college. She has previously talked about what it’s like to experience this emotional time.
”I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I remember him being a baby and then how did this happen?’” she told People. “So that’s where, for us, it’s like, how do you slow down time? Because we know time actually doesn’t slow down. There’s seven of us, but knowing the second that one baby leaves, it changes that dynamic.”
She also wrote about the things she has faced alongside her husband Chip, from “losing a loved one” and “bills we couldn’t pay” to “times when all hope felt lost and circumstances were out of our control. When all I could think to do was lay facedown on the floor in surrender.”
Gaines elaborated on those challenges and how she and Chip managed them together in another essay, writing, “We all live through this kind of building season, when all of life feels like planting and cultivating, checking on your seeds, waiting for growth, then doing it all over again. This is when we forge a career or find our passion.”
Last summer, Gaines wrote that these difficult moments are the ones that make us wonder “if we’ll ever have our ending” and how we’ll get through them.
“And when you do push through, I’m curious whether you’ve ever looked back without thinking, I’m glad I didn’t give up,” she continued. “Maybe you wish it never would have happened in the first place, but I doubt we ever regret being courageous. Because here we see ourselves in the great wheel of transformation. Seasons evolve. Leaves change. We, too, are part of this great becoming.”
Gaines told her readers to “remember fortitude comes to us in the inches forward. Not in one fell swoop or one big break. It is what we earn in the days we cling to what grounds us, in the minutes we are sweating out the last days of our own personal summers.”
“This year, I’m waiting on fall the same way I always do. I’ll watch the sky. I’ll listen for rain. I’ll pause at the trees with turning leaves. But I’ll do it all a little more patiently,” she concluded. “A little more gratefully, remembering that strength isn’t earned in endings or beginnings but in the space I’m forging along the way.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Gaines:
Joanna Gaines has been pretty busy over the last few years. The business owner and mom recently shared her desire to slow down as she steps “into a new season” of her life.
“I sense [a change] coming,” Gaines said while appearing on the TODAY SHOW. “I don’t even know what it is, but I do feel like my heart — like instinctively, I know I’ve got to prepare.”
“At 44, I feel like I’m stepping into a new season,” she continued. “Like, I have half my life, it’s been great, but now I want to really be intentional about what I carry with me as I move forward.”
She and her husband Chip Gaines have spent the last two decades turning their Magnolia Market into a media and retail empire. Now, Gaines is taking stock of her life and figuring out her next move.
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