Waiting for Bamboo

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to travel to Shanghai as a visiting scholar. I had dreamt of going to China for many years and seeing all of the sites I had heard about for so long. The Great Wall. The Forbidden City. The Terracotta Warriors. The Yangtze River. Tiananmen Square. The Bund. A magical concoction I couldn't wait to experience. 

Who knew it would be the roly-poly pandas who would steal my heart?

I watched them for hours; lounging, napping, chewing endless stalks of bamboo. Before our stop in Chengdu it had been rush, rush, rush. But the pandas and I needed time. Just like the bamboo......

"The seed of a bamboo tree is planted, fertilized, and watered. Nothing happens for the first year. There is no sign of growth. The same thing happens the second year. And then the third year. The tree is carefully watered and fertilized each year but nothing shows. No growth. No anything.

After eight years of fertilizing and watering, with nothing to show for it, the bamboo tree suddenly sprouts and grows thirty feet in three months!" – Zig Ziglar