Be More Like a Mushroom

I’ve been thinking about mushrooms lately. Which, admittedly, is not a sentence I ever expected to write. But there I was, walking around outside, looking down at these weird little bastards popping up everywhere, and I started thinking:

“You really have to respect the audacity of a mushroom.”

Nobody planted it. Nobody watered it. Nobody stood over it whispering affirmations. Nobody gave it a five-year plan, a vision board, or told it to live, laugh, love. It just showed up. Right through the dirt.

Sometimes through rotting wood. Sometimes after a storm. Sometimes in a place where absolutely nothing beautiful has any business growing. And yet… There it is.

Maybe that’s why I’ve become a little fascinated by them. Because the older I get, the more I realize that life isn’t really about avoiding the dirt. By It’s about what you decide to do when you find yourself buried in it. We spend so much of our lives trying to make everything look good. We want the nice picture. The successful career. The happy relationship. The perfect family. The clean house. The thriving business. The vacation photos. The smiling faces. We want people to look at our lives and think:

“Damn. He’s got his shit together.”

Meanwhile, half the time we’re held together with caffeine, sarcasm, questionable decisions and whatever emotional duct tape we found in the garage. And maybe that’s okay.

Because mushrooms don’t give a shit about appearances. They don’t wait for perfect conditions. They grow in decay. Think about that for a minute.

They grow in decay.

Fungi are among nature’s great decomposers, helping break down dead organic material and return nutrients to the ecosystem. (US Forest Service R&D⁠)

Nature looked at death, rot and everything that had already fallen apart and basically said:

“We’re not done with this yet.”

There’s something incredibly beautiful about that. And maybe incredibly human. Because some of the strongest parts of us weren’t built during the easy years. They were built in the shit. The disappointments. The people we lost. The plans that didn’t work. The relationships that changed. The doors that closed. The mistakes we’d give anything to undo. The nights when the house was quiet and our minds absolutely refused to be.

Those things change us. Sometimes they break pieces off us. And we’re always told to “move on.” I don’t think we really move on. I think we grow through. There’s a difference. Moving on sounds like pretending something didn’t matter. Growing through means admitting:

Yeah. That hurt.

Yeah. That changed me.

Yeah. There are pieces of the person I used to be that I’m never getting back.

And I’m still here.

Maybe that’s tenacity. Not pretending the storm never happened. Not pretending you weren’t scared. Not pretending you didn’t get knocked flat on your ass. Tenacity is getting up anyway. Maybe not gracefully. Maybe not immediately. Maybe with a limp and a few new swear words. But getting up.

Here’s another thing about mushrooms. What we see above ground isn’t necessarily the whole story.

Fungi can exist as networks of microscopic filaments called hyphae, collectively known as mycelium. Their lives and ecological roles can extend far beyond the little mushroom that finally gets our attention.

I love that idea. Because people are like that too. We see the visible moment. The promotion. The new beginning. The weight lost. The business that finally succeeds. The smile after somebody survived something terrible. The person who finally says, “I’m okay.”

But we rarely see what happened underground. We don’t see the years. We don’t see the failures. We don’t see the crying in the car. We don’t see the 3 a.m. conversations with yourself. We don’t see the hundred times somebody almost quit before the one time they didn’t.

We see the mushroom. We don’t see the miles of struggle underneath it. So maybe we should be a little slower to judge people.

Including ourselves.

Because sometimes when it looks like absolutely nothing is happening… something is happening. You’re healing. You’re learning. You’re changing. You’re putting down roots in places nobody can see yet. You’re figuring out who you are without the things—or the people—you thought you’d always have.

And someday, seemingly out of nowhere… you break through the surface. I’ve lived long enough now to understand something I wish I’d figured out much earlier:

A good life isn’t a life where nothing bad happens.

That’s fantasy.

A good life is one where the bad things don’t get the final word.

There will be storms. There will be loss. There will be betrayal. There will be failures that embarrass the hell out of you. There will be moments when you look around and realize the life you carefully planned has apparently been handed over to a drunken substitute teacher. And there will be days when you’re tired. Not sleepy tired.

Soul tired. The kind where you don’t need a nap. You need about six months, a cabin in the woods, three dogs, no cell service and for everybody to leave you the hell alone.

But somehow… morning comes. You get up. You make coffee. You feed the dogs. You go to work. You answer the phone. You make somebody laugh. You handle the next problem. You keep going.

We rarely call those moments heroic, but maybe we should. Because resilience isn’t always some dramatic comeback with inspirational music playing in the background. Sometimes resilience is incredibly boring.Sometimes resilience is simply:

“Well… shit. I guess we’re doing this again tomorrow.”

And then you do. Maybe that’s what those mushrooms were reminding me. You don’t have to be untouched to be beautiful. You don’t have to have an easy story to have a good story. You don’t have to erase the painful chapters. You don’t even have to understand all of them. Some things that happen to us will never make sense. Some people we love will leave holes that never completely close. Some versions of ourselves are gone forever. And maybe the goal isn’t to become the person you were before. Maybe that’s impossible. Maybe the goal is to become whoever comes next.

Stranger.

Wiser.

Softer in some places.

Harder in others.

A little less interested in impressing people.

A little more interested in actually living.

And hopefully still inappropriate enough to make the respectable people uncomfortable.

Nature doesn’t waste much. The fallen tree becomes food. The dead leaves become soil. Fungi help turn yesterday’s wreckage into tomorrow’s nutrients. What looks like an ending becomes part of something beginning again. And maybe we can do the same.

Take the heartbreak and become more compassionate. Take the failure and become wiser. Take the rejection and become more determined. Take the grief and love people harder while they’re still here. Take the years that didn’t go according to plan and stop calling them wasted. They weren’t wasted.

They made you.

Every beautiful thing about you isn’t beautiful despite what you’ve survived. Some of it is beautiful because of it.

The patience.

The humor.

The empathy.

The ability to sit beside someone who’s hurting and not immediately try to fix them.

The ability to laugh when everything goes sideways.

Especially that one.

Never underestimate the survival value of being able to look directly at a complete dumpster fire and say:

“Well, this is fucking fantastic.”

Sometimes humor isn’t avoiding the darkness. Sometimes it’s how we carry a little light into it.

So yeah.

I’ve been thinking about mushrooms. Those strange little things that appear after storms and grow from places that look finished. They don’t ask permission. They don’t apologize for where they came from. They don’t care whether the conditions were fair. They simply take whatever they’re given… and grow.

Maybe that’s the lesson. When life buries you—grow.

When something beautiful ends—grow.

When somebody breaks your heart—grow.

When the plan falls apart—grow.

When you don’t recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror—grow.

Not because it doesn’t hurt. Not because you’re fearless. Not because you’re some inspirational badass who has everything figured out.

Grow because you’re still here. Grow because there are chapters you haven’t read yet. Grow because there are people you haven’t met yet who are going to matter to you. Grow because somewhere ahead of you is a version of yourself who will look back at what you’re going through right now and whisper:

“You had no idea what was still coming.”

And maybe one day, when somebody asks how the hell you made it through all of it, you won’t have some profound answer. Maybe you’ll just shrug. Smile. And say:

“Apparently I’m a fucking mushroom.”

And you know what? There are worse things to be. Because mushrooms don’t need perfect conditions. They just need one tiny opportunity to break through. And after everything life has thrown at us… so do we.