What is flourishing?

Some people are a bit put off by the question itself and don't easily embrace the idea of designing places for flourishing. It's usually for one of two reasons.

Either it feels arrogant to try to answer. Like, says who? How can anyone define that for someone else? This is a great pushback. I respect it.

Or, to them, flourishing seems too soft, frivolous, maybe even ridiculous-sounding. Like maybe they're afraid flourishing means people are just prancing around and painting all day and never getting any work done. This second group tends to feel uncomfortable with the word. They will say, ehh…what about thriving? Can we aim for thriving? I can live with thriving.

But I actually mean flourishing.

After a lot of looking, researching, thinking, and talking, I've realized it's a lot easier to see what I mean by flourishing if we start by looking at plants.

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Imagine a plant that's thriving. It's healthy and beyond struggling to survive, but to me, it still rhymes too much with striving. Compare that in your mind's eye to a flourishing plant. Flourishing comes from the Latin root "to flower." For me, the flourishing plant moves farther from struggling for survival into being lush, vibrant, fruiting, and flowering. Merriam-Webster says flourishing suggests vigorous, ostentatious, graceful movement; luxuriant growth or profusion. It has a degree of extra, yes, but also more ease.

And it isn't frivolous. Flowering is not the plant taking time off. It's where the fruit comes from.

Feel free to use thriving in your mind if you prefer. But for me, I want to go further. I want to see people luxuriantly, vigorously, gracefully, fully alive.

And that brings me to the more important point:

Flourishing is what life tends to do when it has the right conditions.

Put a seed in good soil. Give it the right amount of light, water, nutrients, room to grow, the right temperature range, and protect it from overwhelming harm. You don't have to instruct it to become a tomato plant. It already contains the capacity for that.

Being alive isn't quite the same thing as flourishing, of course. A plant can be alive and struggling. So can a person. So can a community.

Flourishing has to do with how fully a living thing gets to be what it is. A flourishing tomato plant takes in what it needs, responds to its environment, repairs itself when damaged, flowers, fruits, produces seeds. It doesn't do all of these things all the time—winter matters too—but it keeps the capacity to do what tomato plants do.

And of course, different plants need different things. That gets us back to the first objection people make—and it's true and important to accommodate. It's also fair to say that there are commonalities between all of them that are significant and nameable. We don't have to throw our hands up and just call it all a mystery.

Think of a good gardener preparing good soil, watering when needed, watching for pests. They're not trying to turn carrots into watermelons or lilacs into oak trees. They pay attention to what each plant is and what it needs more or less of. And they're not surprised or disappointed when hydrangeas scorch in full sun or tomatoes don't fruit because they need more sun.

The gardener also isn't deciding what the seed should become. The life itself has significant say in what it becomes.

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Now, obviously, humans are not plants. We complicate the picture.

Humans feel like an infinite variety of seeds scattered in soil, and as they grow, we all start to see, oh, wow! This one's kind of like a variety of green bean; this one seems like corn; this one is…well, I'm not sure we've got a category for this one!

We also have more agency than plants. If we learn we want more or less sun or water, we are (theoretically) not stuck where we were planted.

But I've noticed that we tend to talk about human flourishing as though it's mostly an inside job.

Have the right mindset. Develop better habits. Become more resilient. Find your purpose. Make better choices. Of course these things matter—a lot!

But flourishing is never only an inside job. That is only one half of the equation.

We wouldn't look at a little tomato plant struggling to grow in a crack in the sidewalk, shake our heads, and say, if only it had better habits or tried harder. But we do it with humans all the time.

So the question shifts.

If flourishing is what life tends to do when it has the conditions it needs, what conditions do humans need?

That has become the more interesting question for me.

Some of it is what a plant needs: food, water, light, rest, nothing poisoning or attacking us.

Some of it is ours: Movement. To be known. To matter to something bigger than ourselves. To make things. Beauty. Room to become who we are.

People sometimes flourish under astonishingly difficult conditions, and sometimes fail to flourish despite having every apparent advantage. I suspect that's because some of what we need isn't on the usual lists. You can have every material advantage and not be needed by anyone.

Because this is something we tend to miss: nothing alive flourishes alone. We are parts of families, communities, ecosystems and generations. Our flourishing is entangled with theirs. And it means that becoming more fully ourselves isn't enough if it requires everyone and everything around us to diminish.

Which has led me, at least for now, to something like this:

Flourishing is becoming more fully yourself in a way that makes the whole more alive—and being held by a whole that makes that possible.

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For about twenty years now, I've looked at this flourishing question as one of the great unassigned group projects of our species.

Humans have been asking this forever. There are things we know. There are things we can observe. Different traditions and disciplines hold different pieces. Scientists, poets, sages, and elders from around the world and across time all contribute to this body of knowledge.

I love that we've been wrestling with this for so long. And it's so exciting to me that, only now, within our lifetimes, so much of the world's knowledge is available to all of us. We can learn from other cultures and times, and can work together in our time like never before. 

I'm not claiming we'll have this buttoned up in our lifetime. I imagine we'll keep refining it for a long time still.

But I know it's a quest I want to be part of.